moment for retreat, but
continued with the fighting and were almost annihilated by the Lancers
because of their lack of discretion in that respect. The burghers of the
Free State, in particular, had the instinct of retreating abnormally
developed, and whenever a battle was in progress large numbers of burghers
could be observed going in an opposite direction as rapidly as their
ponies could carry them over the veld. The lack of discipline in the
commandos made such practices possible; in fact there was no rule or law
by which a burgher could be prevented from retreating or deserting
whenever he felt that he did not care to participate in a battle. After
the British occupation of Bloemfontein there was a small skirmish about
eight miles north of that city at a place called Tafelkop which sent the
Free Staters running in all directions. The veld seemed to be filled with
deserters, and at every farmhouse there were from two to six able-bodied
men who had retreated when they believed themselves to be in grave danger.

Foolish men attribute all the moral courage in the world to the soldiers
of their own country, but nature made a wise distribution of that gift,
and not all the Boers were cowards. Boer generals with only a few hundred
men time and again attacked thousands of British soldiers, and frequently
vanquished them. General Botha's twenty-five hundred men held out for a
week against General Buller's thirty or forty thousand men, and General
Cronje with his four thousand burghers succumbed to nothing less than
forty thousand men and a hundred and fifty heavy guns under Field-Marshal
Lord Roberts. Those two examples of Boer bravery would suffice to prove
that the South African farmers had moral courage of no mean order if there
were not a thousand and one other splendid records of bravery. The
burghers did not always lie behind their shelter until the enemy had come
within several hundred yards and then bowl them over with deadly accuracy.
At the Platrand fight near Ladysmith, on January 6th, the Boers charged
and captured British positions, drove the defenders out, and did it so
successfully that only a few Boers were killed. The Spion Kop fight, a
second Majuba Hill, was won after one of the finest displays of moral
courage in the war. It requires bravery of the highest type for a small
body of men to climb a steep hill in the face of the enemy which is three
times greater numerically and armed with larger and more gun