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"Dear Miss Bessie, I am sorry to have to write to you, but though we have quarrelled lately, and also your good uncle, I think it my duty to do so, and send this to your hand by a special runner. Yesterday was a sortie made by the poor folk in Pretoria, who are now as thin with hunger as the high veldt oxen just before spring.
I suggested that the question was an unfair one. "You know how you would answer it yourself, sir." I have spoken of you with the doctor," he said, looking at me kindly for the first time, "and I shall let you go. By rights you ought to go to Pretoria. Of course your general may come and attack us here, and your information will be useful, but we are strong enough for all the English.
Not another word was said, and the noble trio turned on their heels and took their white flag back to Pretoria. Whether Botha was right in allowing these "hands-uppers" to return, is a question I do not care to discuss, but many burghers had their own opinion about it.
In fact, I know that one solemn warning of what would certainly happen to him, if he persisted in his plan of advance, was addressed to Lord Chelmsford, through the officer in command at Pretoria, by a gentlemen whose position and long experience of the Zulus and their mode of attack should have carried some weight.
He carried it to the Prime Minister, who read it with grave satisfaction. "It is just in time, Stafford," he remarked. "You ran it close. We will clinch it instantly. Let us have the code." As the Prime Minister turned over the pages of the code, he said, dryly: "I hear from Pretoria, through Mr. Byng, that President Kruger may send the ultimatum tomorrow.
The Johannesburg Police, who had been among their corps d'elite, had been badly mauled, and the burghers were impressed by one more example of the impossibility of standing in anything approaching to open country against disciplined troops, Roberts had not captured the guns, but the road had been cleared for him to Bloemfontein and, what is more singular, to Pretoria; for though hundreds of miles intervene between the field of Driefontein and the Transvaal capital, he never again met a force which was willing to look his infantry in the eyes in a pitched battle.
Since the beginning of 1901 four men have been shot in the Transvaal, three in Pretoria as spies and breakers of parole, one in Johannesburg as an aggravated case of breaking neutrality by inciting Boers to resist. At the beginning of the war 90 per cent. of the farmers in the northern district of Cape Colony joined the invaders.
After remaining in Natal until after the middle of January the two Frenchmen joined the Free State forces, to whom they rendered valuable assistance. Leon was wounded at Kimberley on February 12th, and, after assisting in establishing the ammunition works at Pretoria and Johannesburg, returned to France.
Pretoria and Johannesburg were already full of deputies and visitors from Cape Colony, Natal, and the Free State, all bound on the same errand of mercy.
Under these conditions they were placed in the Pretoria Gaol, and with the exception of a few subordinates there they have lived or died since. The offences of these natives, for all anyone knows, may have been similar to those of Langalibalele, Dinizulu, Secocoeni, Cetewayo, and other native chiefs whom the British Government have also disposed of without trial.
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