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Updated: June 13, 2025
It was not that they looked different; they were different. I clung desperately to the words of Peter Pienaar. Then something awoke me. The old man laid down his hand to light a cigar. He didn't pick it up at once, but sat back for a moment in his chair, with his fingers tapping on his knees.
Two legs and a pair of very shabby boots vanished through the trap, and suddenly I felt utterly lonely and desperately sad. The guns were beginning to roar again in the east, and in the intervals came the whistle of the rising storm. Peter Pienaar Goes to the Wars
For it was the man I hunted with on the Pungwe in '98 him whom the Kaffirs called "Buck's Horn", because of his long curled moustaches. He was a prince even then, and now he is a very great general. When I saw him, I ran forward and gripped his hand and cried, "Hoe gat het, Mynheer?" and he knew me and shouted in Dutch, "Damn, if it isn't old Peter Pienaar!"
The bridge which would enable the troops to receive their supplies from Lourenco Marques was still intact. General Pienaar and the greater part of his force, amounting to over two thousand men, had crossed the frontier and had been taken down to Delagoa Bay, where they met the respect and attention which brave men in misfortune deserve.
He made some halting inquiries of the station people, and a cab-driver outside finally directed him to the place he sought the cottage of the Widow Summermatter, where resided an English intern, one Peter Pienaar. The porter Joseph Zimmer had had a long and roundabout journey. A fortnight before he had worn the uniform of a British major-general.
Here was I condemned to some rotten buffoonery in inglorious safety, while the salt of the earth like Blaikie was paying the ghastliest price. From him my thoughts flew to old Peter Pienaar, and I sat down on a roadside wall and read his last letter. It nearly made me howl.
There could only be one direction for the advance, and that must be along the Pretoria to Pietersburg railroad. With this object a small but very mobile force rapidly assembled at the end of March at Pienaar River, which was the British rail-head forty miles north of Pretoria and a hundred and thirty from Pietersburg.
It was evident that there could be no end to the war until these last centres of resistance had been broken up. The British forces had advanced as far north as Rustenburg in the west, Pienaar in the centre, and Lydenburg in the east, but here they had halted, unwilling to go farther until their conquests had been made good behind them.
'You and that swine Pienaar. With my best effort at surliness I asked what we had done. 'You lied, because you said you know no German. Apparently your friend knows enough to talk treason and blasphemy. This gave me back some heart. 'I told you I knew a dozen words. But I told you Peter could talk it a bit.
They had given you some very important work which required them to let you into some big secret. So far, good. They evidently thought much of you, even yon Stumm man, though he was as rude as a buffalo. But they did not know you fully, and they wanted to check on you. That check they found in Peter Pienaar. Peter was a fool, and if there was anything to blab, sooner or later Peter would blab it.
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