of the organisation, and it was mutually agreed that the aged
woman should be constantly guarded by them in the event of Pretoria being
besieged. Happily the city was not obliged to experience that horror, and
the club members were spared the ordeal of protecting President and
Mrs. Kruger with their rifles as they had vowed to do.

The Boer women endured many discomforts, suffered many griefs, and bore
many heartaches on account of the war and its varying fortunes, but
throughout it all they acted bravely. There were no wild outbursts of
grief when fathers, husbands, brothers or sons were killed in battle, and
no untoward exclamations of joy when one of them earned distinction in the
field. Reverses of the army were made the occasions for a renewed display
of patriotism or the signal for the sending of another relative to the
field. Unselfishness marked all the works of the woman of the city or
veld, and the welfare of the country was her only ambition. She might have
had erroneous opinions concerning the justice of the war and the causes
which were responsible for it, but she realised that the land for which
her mother and her grandmother had wept and bled and for which all those
whom she loved were fighting and dying was in distress, and she was
patriotic enough to offer herself for a sacrifice on her country's altar.

[Illustration: MRS. COMMANDANT-GENERAL LOUIS BOTHA]

CHAPTER XI

INCIDENTS OF THE WAR

In every battle, and even in a day's life in the laagers, there were
multitudes of interesting incidents as only such a war produces, and
although Sherman's saying that "War is hell" is as true now as it ever
was, there was always a plenitude of amusing spectacles and events to
lighten the burdens of the fighting burghers. There were the sad sides of
warfare, as naturally there would be, but to these the men in the armies
soon became hardened, and only the amusing scenes made any lasting
impression upon their minds. It was strange that when a burgher during a
battle saw one of his fellow-burghers killed in a horrible manner, and
witnessed an amusing runaway, that after the battle he should relate the
details of the latter and say nothing of the former, but such was usually
the case. Men came out of the bloody Spion Kop fight and related amusing
incidents of the struggle, and never touched upon the grave phases until
long afterward when their fund of laughable experiences was
exhausted. After the battle of