appy life.

CHAPTER XV

A WAR OF CEASELESS SURPRISES

What Conan Doyle rightly described as "The great _Boer_ War" came
eventually to be called yet more correctly "The great _Bore_ War." It
grew into a weariness that might well have worn out the patience and
exhausted the resources of almost any nation. No one for a moment
imagined when we reached Koomati Poort that we had come only to the
half-way house of our toils and travels, and that there still lay
ahead of us another twelve months' cruel task. From the very first to
the very finish it has been a war of sharp surprises, and to most the
sharpest surprise of all has been this its wasteful and wanton
prolonging.

[Sidenote: _Exhaustlessness of Boer resources._]

We wondered early, and we wondered late, at the seeming
exhaustlessness of the Boer resources. In their frequent flights they
destroyed, or left for us to capture, almost fabulously large supplies
of food and ammunition; yet at the end of two years of such incessant
waste Kaffirs were still busy pointing out to us remote caves filled
with food stuffs, as in Seccicuni's country, or large pits loaded to
the brim with cases of cartridges. A specially influential Boer
prisoner told me he himself had been present at many such burials,
when 250 cases of mauser ammunition were thus secreted in one place,
and then a similar quantity in another, and I have it on the most
absolute authority possible that when the war began the Boers
possessed not less than 70,000,000 rounds of ball cartridge, and
200,000 rifles of various patterns, which would be tantamount to two
for every adult Dutchman in all South Africa. Kruger, in declaring
war, did not leap before he looked, or put the kettle on the fire
without first procuring an ample supply of coal to keep it boiling.
For many a month before hostilities commenced, if not for years, all
South Africa lay in the hollow of Kruger's hand, excepting only the
seaport towns commanded by our naval guns. At any moment he could have
overrun our South African colonies and none could have said him nay.
These colonies we held, though we knew it not, on Boer sufferance. At
the end of two years of incessant fighting we barely made an end of
the invasion of Cape Colony and Natal, and the altogether unsuspected
difficulty of the task is the true index of the deadliness of the
peril from which this dreadful war has delivered the whole empire.

[Sidenote: _The peculiarity of the