Indeed, If I Were Asked What Struck Me As The Chief
Characteristics Of The Boer I Should Say They Were The Two Qualities
Which The English Have Always Disallowed Him, His Simplicity Rather
Than His "Cuteness," And His Courtesy Rather Than His Boorishness.
The force that waited at the drift by Cronje's farm as it lay spread
out on both sides of the river looked like a gathering of Wisconsin
lumbermen, of Adirondack guides and hunters halted at Paul Smith's,
like a Methodist camp-meeting limited entirely to men.
The eye sought in vain for rows of tents, for the horses at the
picket line, for the flags that marked the head-quarters, the
commissariat, the field telegraph, the field post-office, the A. S.
C., the R. M. A. C., the C. O., and all the other combinations of
letters of the military alphabet.
I remembered that great army of General Buller's as I saw it
stretching out over the basin of the Tugela, like the children of
Israel in number, like Tammany Hall in organization and discipline,
with not a tent-pin missing; with hospitals as complete as those
established for a hundred years in the heart of London; with search-
lights, heliographs, war balloons, Roentgen rays, pontoon bridges,
telegraph wagons, and trenching tools, farriers with anvils, major-
generals, mapmakers, "gallopers," intelligence departments, even
biographs and press-censors; every kind of thing and every kind of
man that goes to make up a British army corps. I knew that seven
miles from us just such another completely equipped and disciplined
column was advancing to the opposite bank of the Sand River.
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