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Updated: June 14, 2025
This was what one heard on all sides, and in view of more recent events it is rather significant; but I remember then the thought flashed across my mind that these possible foes were the sons of the men who had annihilated us at Majuba and Laing's Nek, and I wondered whether another black page were going to be added to the country's history.
And of these books I shall, first of all, heartily recommend the series of cheap sixpenny reprints now published by the Rationalist Press Association, Johnson's Court, London, E.C. R.P.A. REPRINTS Huxley's Lectures and Essays. Tyndall's Lectures and Essays. Laing's Human Origins. Laing's Modern Science and Modern Thought. Clodd's Pioneers of Evolution. Matthew Arnold's Literature and Dogma.
All this valuable information was contained in the dispatches, which lay, with their priceless messages, on the said April 28th, in Mr. Arthur Laing's flannel jacket, inside his portmanteau, on the way to Paris. Paris claims to be the centre of the world, and if it be, the world has a very good centre. Anyhow Paris becomes, from this moment, the centre of this drama.
One of the Boer guards noticed the attention I paid to these arrangements. 'It is in case we have to go back quickly to the Biggarsberg or Laing's Nek, he explained. As we travelled on I gradually fell into conversation with this man. His name, he told me, was Spaarwater, which he pronounced Spare-water. He was a farmer from the Ermolo district. In times of peace he paid little or no taxes.
There was a rumour of the Bronker's Spruit disaster and other rumours of the investment of Pretoria, and of the advance of large bodies of Boers to take possession of the pass over the Drakensberg, known as Laing's Nek, but there was no definite intelligence. "You won't get into Pretoria," said one melancholy man, "so it's no use trying.
It was a country of ridges, depressions, rocks, ditches, moraines of mining-tailings not even as favorable for cavalry work as Laing's Nek had been in the former disastrous days. Jameson shot at the ridges and rocks with his artillery, just as General Colley had done at the Nek; and did them no damage and persuaded no Boer to show himself.
So I went, and when I saw how the dear Lord had put it into the heart of the English general to be a bigger fool even that day than he is every day, and to try and drive us out of Laing's Nek with a thousand of his poor rooibaatjes, then, I tell you, I saw where the right lay, and I said, 'Damn the English Government! What is the English Government doing here? and after Ingogo I said it again."
North of Newcastle we saw a station bearing the name of Ingogo; later on the train wound round the base of Majuba Hill, and when that was felt behind it plunged into a long rocky tunnel which pierces the grassy slope on which the tragedy of Laing's Nek was enacted all names, alas! too well known in the annals of our disasters.
"It was well worth seizing, for it completely commanded the Boer's position on Laing's Nek, and had the whole force come up the Boers must have fallen back directly it was captured. However, Colley decided not to wait, and with about five hundred and fifty men and officers he started at night.
They had crossed the Tugela, they had relieved Ladysmith, they had forced Laing's Nek, and now it was to them that the honour had fallen of following the enemy into this last fastness.
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