In the Shadow of Death | Page 4

are adding their sobs to the plaintive exhortations of the
wounded. All the time the shelling never abates. The arena of the
defenders is veneered. Nearly every man, woman and child is
lyddite-stained. The muddy stream is yellow. The night was an awful
one. For two days the men are without food, but worse still are the
pestiferous air, the loathsome water, and the suffering of the wounded.
It is too much for flesh and blood. The morning of the 27th February
saw the first white flag hoisted by a Boer general. It was a woeful sight
when 3600 Boers, undisciplined peasants, reluctantly threw down their
rifles among the wreck of the shells and ambled past the English lines.
They had withstood the onslaught of 80,000 British troops with modern
death-dealing implements of war, and, towards the end of the siege,
about 1000 guns were brought to bear upon them."
How far this disaster can be attributed to General Cronje is difficult to
say. The following considerations may, however, throw some light on
its causes.
During the early part of the war we hardly realised the great value and
necessity of good scouting. It was only after General Cronje and his
men had fallen into the hands of the enemy that a regular scouting
corps was organised and placed under the control of the brave Danie
Therou.
Lord Roberts's forces were almost on Cronje's laager before they were
perceived, and unfortunately they were even then entirely
under-estimated and consequently thought light of. Flushed by the
victory at Magersfontein, the General did not contemplate the
possibility of such a bitter reverse. He was going to strike another hard
blow at the enemy--he did strike it, but at too great a cost. Had he
realised his position the first or second day after the siege was begun,

he might still have escaped. The convoy would have been captured, but
the men would have been saved. The old gentleman was determined to
hold all, and consequently lost all.
So far the General deserves censure and is accountable for the disaster
which had such a far-reaching and bad moral effect on the rest of the
burghers. The only sweet drop contained in the bitter cup extended to
us was the fact that Cronje and his burghers surrendered as men, and
not as cowards. Once surrounded and brought to bay they resisted
every attack with admirable fortitude and valour. Surrounded along the
banks of the Modder River, at a spot where they had no cover at all,
exposed to a terrific cannonade and charged by thousands of the enemy
from time to time, these farmers fearlessly repelled every onslaught. It
was one thing to surround them, another thing to capture them. They
were not to be taken with cold hands. The enemy, especially the
Canadians, had to pay a great price before the white flag announced
Cronje's unconditional surrender.
During the siege attempts were made by General De Wet to relieve
Cronje, but none succeeded. Several of the relieving forces, including
the pick of the Winburg Commando with Commandant Theunissen,
were themselves surrounded and captured in trying to break through the
lines of the besiegers.
To intensify the gloom, Ladysmith, which was daily expected to fall,
was relieved on the day of Cronje's surrender. For certain reasons the
late Commandant-General P. Joubert had evacuated the positions round
Ladysmith and retreated to the Biggar's Range. General Louis Botha,
who was engaging Buller's relieving forces at Colenso, was then also
compelled to retreat.
After Cronje's capture the way to Bloemfontein and Pretoria lay open.
The Boers made one more stand at Abraham's Kraal, where the enemy
suffered heavily, but carried the day by their overwhelming numbers.
After the British occupied Bloemfontein the Transvaal burghers
became reluctant to offer battle in the Free State, on the ground that
there were no positions from which they could successfully check the
ever-advancing foe. Many of the Free Staters were discouraged and

hopeless; but rest renewed their strength and zeal, and they shortly
returned to the struggles.
The second disaster which befell the two Republics was the
ignominious and cowardly surrender of Prinsloo, which took place on
the 1st of August, 1900. For various reasons this surrender was more
keenly felt by the Boers than that of Cronje. The one, though he might
have blundered, nevertheless acted the part of a brave, though obstinate,
man; the other that of a coward.
Some six weeks after the occupation of Bloemfontein the British troops
resumed their northward march, and so quickly did they advance,
almost day and night, that Pretoria was soon occupied. What this rapid
movement meant, we could not quite understand. Did Lord Roberts
think that the occupation of Pretoria would terminate hostilities? The
British forces in their swift march to the Transvaal