Let it be remembered in all accounts of battles in this

war that, if Tommy has the hottest sort of work, he does it side by side with his officers. Such is the traditional Anglo-Saxon way.

CHAPTER XIV

BOERS IN WAR

AFTER the Belmont battle I walked over the entire field, and between what I saw, and what was told me by our officers and men who had taken part in the assault, I learned more about the Boers as fighting men than I had been able to gather all over the Cape Colony in the preceding four weeks.

A kopje in this country is practically a pile of boulders—a stone heap. It may be either a hill or a small mountain-fifty feet or one thousand five hundred feet in height, though in the battlefields where we had thus far fought the kopjes had not been above five hundred, or less than one hundred and fifty feet.

All were heaps of loose boulders, and the practice of the enemy was to lift and carry the smaller rocks about, so as to build breastworks of them.

Behind these, always built around the tops of the hills, the Boers hide and shoot.

Let me describe the top of one small hill in the Bel

mont engagement, the one in storming which the brave Grenadiers suffered part of their fearfully heavy loss. All around the edge of its crest were circular or semi-circular breastworks of rocks. They were so many forts-one for each fighting man. Placed high in air, and overlooking a great valley, they were very like the lofty eyries of birds of prey. To look into them, with their rude bedding, scattered food, and general debris, was as if one viewed the nests of so many hawks.

On this kopje the Boer commander had compelled the poorer men of his commando to live for weeks. I took it that these were men of the servant and the labourer class. Their dead, whose untidy and neglected bodies I saw seated as the British bullets and bayonets found them, confirmed this theory, for they were poorly clad, unshaven, unclean, and hungry-looking. They were of that class of Boer whom James Bryce describes as having started at a seventeenth-century standard, and deteriorated for three hundred years. I knew when I saw such men among the dead, the wounded, and the prisoners, how it could be that white men could misuse the white flag, and mock the sacred purpose of the Geneva Cross.

In nearly every eyrie where men had been compelled to stay and live there was a tea-kettle, an extra coat for night covering, a sack in which food and clothes had been brought, and which next had served as a pallet;

some mealies, unleavened biscuits or bread-cakes, junks of biltong or jerked meat, and a kitchen knife.

The food, the dirt, and the extraordinary profusion of cartridges and cartridge-wrappings were all mixed together, but the dirt and the disorder were not so offensive as the grimy and revolting condition of the dead.

A few commanding breastworks had been built as for a citadel on the crest of the kopje above the ring of eyries.

In one of these I found a young Boer dead, with a bullet hole in his forehead. He was of a superior type, intelligent of face, neatly dressed, and had been shooting with gloves on his hands. Had he lived to escape he would have been one of the very great many Boers who were seen flying down the farther side of the range of kopjes, and leaping upon their horses or into their Cape carts and "spiders." They had done what damage they could to us, and as soon as their own lives were endangered, they commanded their subordinates to remain, and sought their own safety.

These are Boer principles--in keeping with the etiquette and conventions of a people who know neither the customs nor courtesies of war. It is not by guesswork that I thus describe their methods. It is what our prisoners have told me.

It would take long to exhaust the list of peculiarities,

eccentricities, anomalies, and novelties of this war, waged against us by an undisciplined force of rebels, who are soldiers by instinct, slayers by training, and farmers or cattle-raisers for livelihood. But more astonishing is the fact that some of the better-class Boers have come to battle in their carriages, like gentlemen driving to the Derby at home, and, having done their best, have retired in the same way, leaving their vassals to cover their retreat.

More numerous than those who come in carriages to battle are those who send their best horses ahead, and ride to the front on inferior animals. They "kneehalter" their best horses, turn out upon the veldt the poorer ones they have ridden, and-when retreat is ordered-run down the kopjes and mount their fast steeds in order to be able to elude a cavalry chase, which had thus far been impossible because the horses of our few mounted men had either had too much work earlier in the day, or were overwhelmed by fire from unexpected quarters.

I heard that the only uniforms in the Boer ranks were those of the Transvaal Artillery, but if this was true, I had not yet seen them. All whom I had seen were clad like the farmers and villagers we met with along our line of march. They wore short coats, trousers of patterns that are often so loud that they almost scream, and narrow-brimmed soft hats of light. brown felt.