Chapter 1

THE BOER NATIONS

Take a community of Dutchmen of the type of those who defended
themselves for fifty years against all the power of Spain at a time
when Spain was the greatest power in the world. Intermix with them a
strain of those inflexible French Huguenots who gave up home and
fortune and left their country for ever at the time of the revocation
of the Edict of Nantes. The product must obviously be one of the most
rugged, virile, unconquerable races ever seen upon earth. Take this
formidable people and train them for seven generations in constant
warfare against savage men and ferocious beasts, in circumstances
under which no weakling could survive, place them so that they acquire
exceptional skill with weapons and in horsemanship, give them a
country which is eminently suited to the tactics of the huntsman, the
marksman, and the rider. Then, finally, put a finer temper upon their
military qualities by a dour fatalistic Old Testament religion and an
ardent and consuming patriotism. Combine all these qualities and all
these impulses in one individual, and you have the modern Boer -- the
most formidable antagonist who ever crossed the path of Imperial
Britain. Our military history has largely consisted in our conflicts
with France, but Napoleon and all his veterans have never treated us
so roughly as these hard-bitten farmers with their ancient theology
and their inconveniently modern rifles.

Look at the map of South Africa, and there, in the very centre of the
British possessions, like the stone in a peach, lies the great stretch
of the two republics, a mighty domain for so small a people. How came
they there? Who are these Teutonic folk who have burrowed so deeply
into Africa? It is a twice-told tale, and yet it must be told once
again if this story is to have even the most superficial of
introductions. No one can know or appreciate the Boer who does not
know his past, for he is what his past has made him.

It was about the time when Oliver Cromwell was at his zenith -- in
1652, to be pedantically accurate -- that the Dutch made their first
lodgment at the Cape of Good Hope. The Portuguese had been there
before them, but, repelled by the evil weather, and lured forwards by
rumours of gold, they had passed the true seat of empire and had
voyaged further to settle along the eastern coast. Some gold there
was, but not much, and the Portuguese settlements have never been
sources of wealth to the mother country, and never will be until the
day when Great Britain signs her huge cheque for Delagoa Bay. The
coast upon which they settled reeked with malaria. A hundred miles of
poisonous marsh separated it from the healthy inland plateau. For
centuries these pioneers of South African colonisation