It had been hoped that the dispersal of the main Boer army, the
capture of its guns and the expulsion of many both of the burghers
and of the foreign mercenaries, would have marked the end of the
war. These expectations were, however, disappointed, and South
Africa was destined to be afflicted and the British Empire
disturbed by a useless guerilla campaign. After the great and
dramatic events which characterised the earlier phases of the
struggle between the Briton and the Boer for the mastery of South
Africa it is somewhat of the nature of an anticlimax to turn one's
attention to those scattered operations which prolonged the
resistance for a turbulent year at the expense of the lives of many
brave men on either side. These raids and skirmishes, which had
their origin rather in the hope of vengeance than of victory,
inflicted much loss and misery upon the country, but, although we
may deplore the desperate resolution which bids brave men prefer
death to subjugation, it is not for us, the countrymen of Hereward
or Wallace, to condemn it.
In one important respect these numerous, though trivial, conflicts
differed from the battles in the earlier stages of the war. The
British had learned their lesson so thoroughly that they often
turned the tables upon their instructors. Again and again the
surprise was effected, not by the nation of hunters, but by those
rooineks whose want of cunning and of veld-craft had for so long
been a subject of derision and merriment. A year of the kopje and
the donga had altered all that. And in the proportion of casualties
another very marked change had occurred. Time was when in battle
after battle a tenth would have been a liberal estimate for the
losses of the Boers compared with those of the Briton. So it was at
Stormberg; so it was at Colenso; so it may have been at
Magersfontein. But in this last stage of the war the balance was
rather in favour of the British. It may have been because they were
now frequently acting on the defensive, or it may have been from an
improvement in their fire, or it may have come from the more
desperate mood of the burghers, but in any case the fact remains
that every encounter diminished the small reserves of the Boers
rather than the ample forces of their opponents.
One other change had come over the war, which caused more distress
and searchings of conscience among some of the people of Great
Britain than the darkest hours of their misfortunes. This lay in
the increased bitterness of the struggle, and in those more
strenuous measures which the British commanders felt themselves
entitled and compelled to adopt. Nothing could exceed the lenity of
Lord Roberts's early proclamations in the Free State. But, as the
months went on and the struggle still continued, the war assumed a
harsher aspect. Every farmhouse represented a possible fort, and a
probable depot for the enemy.
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