Chapter 30

THE CAMPAIGN OF DE WET

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 roineks whose
want of cunning and of veldt-craft had for so long been a subject of
derision and merriment. A year of the kopje and the donga had altered
all that. And in the proportion of casualties another very marked
change had occurred. Time was when in battle after battle a tenth
would have been a liberal estimate for the losses of the Boers
compared with those of the Briton. So it was at Stormberg; so it was
at Colenso; so it may have been at Magersfontein. But in this last
stage of the war the balance was rather in favour of the British. It
may have been because they were now frequently acting on the
defensive, or it may have been from an improvement in their fire, or
it may have come from the more desperate mood of the burghers, but in
any case the fact remains that every encounter diminished the small
reserves of the Boers rather than the ample forces of their opponents.

One other change had come over the war, which caused more distress and
searchings of conscience among some of the people of Great Britain
than the darkest hours of their misfortunes. This lay in the
increased bitterness of the struggle, and in those more strenuous
measures which the British commanders felt themselves entitled and
compelled to adopt. Nothing could exceed the lenity of Lord Roberts's
early proclainations in the Free State. But,