Boer tactics._]

How it was the Boers did not succeed at the very outset in driving the
British into the sea, when we had only skeleton forces to oppose them,
was best explained to me by a son of the late State Secretary, who
penned the ultimatum, and whom I found among our prisoners in
Pretoria. The Boers are not farmers. Speaking broadly there is
scarcely an acre of ploughed land in all the Transvaal. "The men are
shepherds, their trade hath been to feed cattle." But before they
could thus, like the Patriarchs, become herdsmen, they perforce still,
like their much loved Hebrew prototypes, had to become hunters, and
clear the land of savage beasts and savage men. The hunter's
instincts, the hunter's tactics were theirs, and no hunter comes out
into the open if he can help it. It is no branch of his business to
make a display of his courage and to court death. His part is to kill,
so silently, so secretly, as to avoid being killed. Traps and
tricking, not to say treachery, and shooting from behind absolutely
safe cover, are the essential points in a hunter's tactics. Caution to
him is more than courage, and it is precisely along those lines the
Boers make war. In almost every case when they ventured into the open
it was the doing of their despised foreign auxiliaries. The kind of
courage required for the actual conquest of the colonies the Boers had
never cultivated or acquired. The men who in six months and six days
could not rush little Mafeking hoped in vain to capture Cape Town,
unless they caught it napping. But in defensive warfare, in cunningly
setting snares like that at Sanna's Post, in skilful concealment as at
Modder River, when all day long most of our men were quite unable to
discover on which side of the stream the Boer entrenchments were, and
in what they called clever trickery, but we called treachery, they are
absolutely unsurpassable. So was it through the earlier stages of the
campaign. So was it through the later stages.

Another cause of Boer failure as explained to me by the State
Secretary's son was the inexperience and incompetency of their
generals, who had won what little renown was theirs in Zulu or Kaffir
wars. Amajuba, at which only about half a battalion of our troops took
part, was the biggest battle they had ever fought against the British,
and it led the more illiterate among them to believe they could whip
all England's armies as easily as they could sjambok a Kaffir. Their
leaders of