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Updated: June 13, 2025
During that period, which commenced after the disaster at Majuba Hill, "equal rights" were a golden dream which only the most optimistic ever hoped to see realized.
Beside one Boer was found one of the old Martini rifles taken from the 52nd at Majuba. On the top of Cæsar's Camp our dead were laid out for burial Manchesters, Gordons, and Rifle Brigade together. The Boers turned an automatic Maxim on the burying party, thinking they were digging earthworks.
Cronje in vain endeavoured to persuade the burghers to postpone the surrender over Majuba Day. In a few hours 4,000 men, the majority of whom were Transvaalers, were under guard as prisoners of war, and Cronje was on his way to St. Helena, there to commune with the Shade of Napoleon.
Behind an entrenchment, however slight, one would think that 600 English soldiers might have defied the whole Boer army, and much more the 200 or 300 men by whom they were hunted down Majuba.
In some quarters the defeats of Majuba and Laing's Nek rankled deeply; yet they were fair fights, and Time can be trusted to allay the feelings of those who are worsted in a fair fight; but there were other matters which roused a spirit in the English-speaking people of South Africa that had never been known before.
At daybreak they were to operate on the enemy's right flank the parallel with Majuba is grimly obvious in conjunction with an attack from Ladysmith on his centre and right. They started. At half-past ten they passed through a kind of defile, the Boers a thousand feet above them following every movement by ear, if not by eye.
The crisis is over, and the army now on the seas may move with measured strides to effect a final settlement that is both wise and just. In that short message eighteen years of heartburnings are healed. The abandoned colonist, the shamed soldier, the 'cowardly Englishman, the white flag, the 'How about Majuba? all gone for ever. At last 'the Boers defeated. Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!
In the old stiff-rank Majuba days we should have been swept in an hour from the position. But the wily man behind the rock was now to find an equally wily man in front of him. The soldier had at last learned something of the craft of the hunter.
Reasoning from experience they hope to make history repeat itself in another Majuba Hill. One would have thought that the fights at Elandslaagte and Dundee would dispel delusions of that kind based on the assumption that Tommy Atkins will not stand up against rifle bullets at short range from Boers whom he cannot see if they but steal upon him and open fire where he least expects to find them.
At the Platrand fight near Ladysmith, on January 6th, the Boers charged and captured British positions, drove the defenders out, and did it so successfully that only a few Boers were killed. The Spion Kop fight, a second Majuba Hill, was won after one of the finest displays of moral courage in the war.
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