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.
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