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However, I was not permitted to stay long inside, for as soon as the mounted Boers were out of hearing Joeboy came to the front of the wagon and called to me in his deep tones speaking in Boer Dutch to come out. I stepped out past the driver, yawning as if tired, and leaped down, to walk on with the black. "Hadn't you better turn the heads of the leading bullocks now towards the laager, Joeboy?"
They are wonderfully patriotic, these Boer girls and women, and are merciless in their contempt for a man who will not do his share of fighting, marching, and watching cheerfully and uncomplainingly.
He knew that there were suspicions abroad in the Transvaal concerning him, but he expected to get through to Johannesburg before they should become general and obstructive. But a telegraph wire had been overlooked and not cut. It spread the news of his invasion far and wide, and a few hours after his start the Boer farmers were riding hard from every direction to intercept him.
Judging from appearances, you would never have taken this portly, rubicund, iron-gray, bushy-browed gentleman for a statesman. But a statesman he was for all that, and the Emperor and Germany miss him sorely. I would have taken him for a Boer Dopper or an English yeoman. This suggestion was supported by his atrocious taste in fancy waistcoats. The one he had on still sticks in my memory.
It would have been heartrending to many a continental or American general to see the unmilitary appearance of the Boer burgher, and in what manner an army of children, great-grandfathers, invalids, and blind men, with a handful of good men to leaven it, could be of any service whatever would have been quite beyond his conception.
But this General Rundle wisely declined to do; it was victory, not glory, he was seeking, and he was wise enough to know that a victory can be bought at far too high a price in country of this kind against a foe like the wily Boer.
'L'État c'est moi' is almost as true of the old Dopper President as it was of its originator; for in matters of external policy and in matters which concern the Boer as a party the President has his way as surely and as completely as any anointed autocrat.
Nothing has been refused the enemy, save only independence, and that can never be given, if the war has to continue until the last Boer is deported out of Africa. It is only necessary to refer briefly to the unofficial Boer attempts at peace. A considerable body of the Boers, including many men of influence and of intelligence, were disposed to accept the British flag and to settle down in peace.
He was small in stature, like the other man, but there was a note of uncertainty about him which seemed to betoken that his opinion of himself did not measure up in proportion to that of the other Boer. Number two looked about him a bit, and occasionally directed a furtive glance at number one, who, on the other hand, stolidly regarded the array of goods spread out before him.
We were unenlivened by the talk we heard on all sides as to the probable effect of the Foreign Consuls' protests; in optimistic quarters it was felt that the protests would lead to "intervention" of a kind rather different from that bargained for by brother Boer. The war, it was asserted, might stop "very suddenly."
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