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Updated: June 3, 2025
Although we had no idea of the enemy's strength, we were fully prepared to meet the attack; the Pretoria, Lydenburg and other laagers were posted to the left on the summit of Majuba Hill, and other commandos held good positions on the east. But the enemy evidently thought that we had fled all the way back to Pretoria, and not expecting to find the Nek occupied, advanced quite unconcerned.
Certain women baked the bread, prepared sandwiches, and boiled coffee; others procured the supplies, and others distributed the food at the various railway stations through which the commando-trains passed, or carried it directly to the laagers. One of the women who was tireless in her efforts to feed the burghers and make them comfortable as they passed through Pretoria on the railway was Mrs.
Is this hundredth day of siege to be the last, or shall we wake to-morrow to hear that the Boer laagers are back again, and the relieving force once more south of the Tugela? February 7. Sir Redvers Buller evidently finds that the new key of the road to Ladysmith fits no better than the old, and we begin to doubt whether he will be able to force the lock yet.
They travel fast, because they travel light; they use very little water, because they find it impossible to move it from place to place. Many critics charge them with habits of personal uncleanliness. It is true that in their laagers one does not see as much soap and water used as in our camps, but this is possibly due to want of opportunity as much as to want of inclination.
The old British pioneer may have whelped a few million good fighting stock in his time, but this class of animal is no lion's whelp; it is a thing all mouth and no manners, a shallow-brained, cowardly creature, always howling about the Boer, but too discreet to go out and fight him, though ready at all times to malign him, to ridicule him as a farmer or a fighter, and it is a perfect bear's feast to this hybrid animal to get hold of a gullible newspaper correspondent to tell him gruesome tales relative to Boer fighting laagers.
The ox-waggons of settlers were drawn up outside in little circles here and there, so as to form laagers, which acted practically as temporary forts for the protection of the outskirts. In one of these I was posted.
When Botha left for the south he instructed B. Viljoen to carry on for him; but when he joined the itinerant Transvaal Government at Amsterdam he was disappointed to find that little or nothing had been done in his absence, thanks chiefly to the mobile energy of Benson, who hovered like a hawk over the terrorized laagers.
And then came the orderly crowding to the door, and they were outside under the great violet sky, throbbing with splendid stars, breathing the tainted air that came from the laagers and the trenches. But oh, was there ever a sweeter night, following upon a sweeter day? Beauvayse's hand found and pressed Lynette's. She looked up and saw his eyes shining in the starlight.
Also we Free-Staters had endured much from the Basutos, in the wars of 1865 and 1867. History had thus taught us to place Brandwachten round our laagers at night, and to reconnoitre during the hours of darkness as well as in the day-time.
The magnanimity of Buller was manifest: he desired to give White the opportunity of surrendering without incurring the full responsibility for the act, but the lack of military instinct in Buller's mind was likewise manifest. To this message, which was suspected in Ladysmith to have originated in the Boer laagers, White replied that he had no intention of surrendering.
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