It was like trying to turn back the
waves of the sea with a blow-pipe.
It is true they had held back as many at Colenso, but the defensive
positions there were magnificent, and since then six months had
passed, during which time the same thirty thousand men who had been
fighting then were fighting still, while the enemy was always new,
with fresh recruits and re-enforcements arriving daily.
As the English officers at Durban, who had so lately arrived from
home that they wore swords, used to say with the proud consciousness
of two hundred thousand men back of them: "It won't last much longer
now. The Boers have had their belly full of fighting. They're fed
up on it; that's what it is; they're fed up."
They forgot that the Boers, who for three months had held Buller back
at the Tugela, were the same Boers who were rushed across the Free
State to rescue Cronje from Roberts, and who were then sent to meet
the relief column at Fourteen Streams, and were then ordered back
again to harass Roberts at Sannahspost, and who, at last, worn out,
stale, heartsick, and hopeless at the unequal odds and endless
fighting, fell back at Sand River.
For three months thirty thousand men had been attempting the
impossible task of endeavoring to meet an equal number of the enemy
in three different places at the same time.
I have seen a retreat in Greece when the men, before they left the
trenches, stood up in them and raged and cursed at the advancing
Turk, cursed at their government, at their king, at each other, and
retreated with shame in their faces because they did so.
But the retreat of the burghers of the Free State was not like that.
They rose one by one and saddled their ponies, with the look in their
faces of men who had been attending the funeral of a friend and who
were leaving just before the coffin was swallowed in the grave. Some
of them, for a long time after the greater number of the commando had
ridden away, sat upon the rocks staring down into the sunny valley
below them, talking together gravely, rising to take a last look at
the territory which was their own. The shells of the victorious
British sang triumphantly over the heads of their own artillery,
bursting impotently in white smoke or tearing up the veldt in
fountains of dust.
But they did not heed them. They did not even send a revengeful
bullet into the approaching masses. The sweetness of revenge could
not pay for what they had lost. They looked down upon the farm-
houses of men they knew; upon their own farm-houses rising in smoke;
they saw the Englishmen like a pest of locusts settling down around
gardens and farm-houses still nearer, and swallowing them up.
