al Joubert, aided by
General Cronje, commanding the Boers.

Before November 2d three serious engagements had taken place, and the
English had been compelled to fall back upon their base of supplies at
Ladysmith, where, after an ineffectual sortie on October 30th, they
were surrounded and their communications cut off.

The campaign continued to be a story of humiliating defeats until
December, when Lord Roberts assumed supreme command, with Lord
Kitchener as his chief of staff. {186} England thoroughly aroused was
sending men and supplies in unstinted measure for the great emergency,
and the world looked on in amazement as 200,000 British soldiers under
the greatest British commanders were kept at bay for something less
than three years by 30,000 untrained Boers. The British Government had
forgotten that these South African colonists were the children of a
French Huguenot ancestry which had defied Louis XIV., and of the men
who cut the dykes when the Netherlands were invaded by that same
tyrant. Some one had wittily said that no member of the Cabinet should
be allowed to cast his vote for the war, until he had read Motley's
"Rise of the Dutch Republic." And, indeed, it appeared to many that
the view of the Government was focussed upon one single point, the
establishing of British authority at any cost in South Africa. At the
same time many eminent Englishmen believed it was not to be expected
that a community so long established in a home of its own {187}
choosing, should upon demand be ready to bestow upon foreigners all the
rights of citizenship; and many also believed that the grievances of
the "Outlanders" were not greater than ordinarily existed when a mass
of foreign immigrants were pressing in upon a people who suspected and
disliked them. The sympathy of foreign states was strongly with the
Boers; and in England itself the cause evoked a languid enthusiasm,
until aroused by disaster, and until the pride of the nation was
touched by loss of prestige. The danger, the enormous difficulties to
be overcome, the privations and suffering of their boys, these were the
things which awoke the dormant enthusiasm in the heart of the nation.
And when the only son of Lord Roberts had been offered as a sacrifice,
and then a son of Lord Dufferin, and then, Prince Victor, October 29,
1900, grandson of the Queen herself, the cause had become sacred, and
one for which any loyal Briton would be willing to die.

By Septembe