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Updated: May 13, 2025
Perhaps we had covered a couple of miles of the ten or twelve which still lay between us and Strathmuir, when far off on the crest of one of the waves of the veld which much resembled those of the swelling sea frozen while in motion, I saw a small figure approaching us at a rapid trot. Somehow that figure suggested Hans to my mind, so much so that I fetched my glasses to examine it more closely.
But I wish I could get her a fair trial from one of the big pilots. I'm only in the second class myself after all. We were running north of St just when above the rattle of the train rose a curious dull sound. It came from the east, and was like the low growl of a veld thunderstorm, or a steady roll of muffled drums. 'Hark to the guns! cried Archie.
After that, below and still below, the flat and staring plain, through which runs an ugly rift turning and twisting like a snake, and moving on and on, till lost in the arc of other hills away to the east and the south: a river in the waste, but still only a muddy current stealing between banks baked and sterile, a sinister stream, giving life to the veld, as some gloomy giver of good gifts would pay a debt of atonement.
So we were initiated by having to pass the first nights of our commando life on the open veld with insufficient food. And in the daytime our work was cut out for us, as every other minute our horses disappeared lost among the thousands of horses that all looked exactly alike in the eyes of an inexperienced townsman.
On the other hand, no words can be too high for the gallant little band of Boers who had the courage to face that overwhelming mass of horsemen, and to bluff them into regarding this handful as a force fighting a serious rearguard action. When the stories of the war are told round the fires in the lonely veld farmhouses, as they will be for a century to come, this one deserves an honoured place.
It was a mongrel, half spaniel and half bull-terrier, which for years had been the dear friend of my youth and died at last on the horns of a wounded wildebeeste that attacked me when I had fallen from my horse upon the veld.
Thus the brothers De Wet gained not only an actual, but also a moral success of the greatest importance to their cause, and took away the prizes they had so unexpectedly won, under the eyes of a strong British force helplessly watching the commandos trailing away across the veld.
Didn't I drive her and the other woman over from Haargrond, with Bough's little beast pulling in a cart of my own? Call the other woman, and she will tell you it was as I say." Lady Hannah, supremely disdainful, turned her back upon the liar.... "So, then, you are not willing to go back in a veld waggon?" demanded the bullying voice.
"It was in South Africa, my Convent ... more than a thousand miles from Cape Town, in British Baraland, on the Transvaal Border in a little village-town, dumped down in the middle of the veld." "What on earth is the veld?" asks the lady of the red umbrella, with acerbity. "I'm sick of seeing the word in the papers, and nobody seems to know what it means."
Lord Kitchener's plan was the extension across the veld of the system of blockhouse lines which at first ran only along the railways, and the formation of pens or enclaves into which the attenuated roving bands of Boers were to be herded and dealt with severally and severely. The work of extension was taken in hand in July, 1901.
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