Behind Them
All There May Have Been The Dutch Ambition To Dominate South
Africa.
It was no petty object for which Britain fought.
When a
nation struggles uncomplainingly through months of disaster she may
claim to have proved her conviction of the justice and necessity of
the struggle. Should Dutch ideas or English ideas of government
prevail throughout that huge country? The one means freedom for a
single race, the other means equal rights to all white men beneath
one common law. What each means to the coloured races let history
declare. This was the main issue to be determined from the instant
that the clock struck five upon the afternoon of Wednesday, October
the eleventh, eighteen hundred and ninety-nine. That moment marked
the opening of a war destined to determine the fate of South
Africa, to work great changes in the British Empire, to seriously
affect the future history of the world, and incidentally to alter
many of our views as to the art of war. It is the story of this war
which, with limited material but with much aspiration to care and
candour, I shall now endeavour to tell.
CHAPTER 5.
TALANA HILL.
It was on the morning of October 12th, amid cold and mist, that the
Boer camps at Sandspruit and Volksrust broke up, and the burghers
rode to the war. Some twelve thousand of them, all mounted, with
two batteries of eight Krupp guns each, were the invading force
from the north, which hoped later to be joined by the Freestaters
and by a contingent of Germans and Transvaalers who were to cross
the Free State border.
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