From Capetown to Ladysmith | Page 3

reason.
Everything sounded quiet and calm enough for Capetown--yet plainly
feeling was strained tight to snapping. A member rose to put a question,
and prefaced it with a brief invective against all Boers and their friends.
He would go on for about ten minutes, when suddenly angry cries of
"Order!" in English and Dutch would rise. The questioner commented
with acidity on the manners of his opponents. They appealed to the
chair: the Speaker blandly pronounced that the hon. gentleman had
been out of order from the first word he uttered. The hon. gentleman
thereon indignantly refused to put his question at all; but, being
prevailed to do so, gave an opening to a Minister, who devoted ten
minutes to a brief invective against all Uitlanders and their friends.
Then up got one of the other side--and so on for an hour. Most
delicious of all was a white-haired German, once colonel in the
Hanoverian Legion which was settled in the Eastern Province, and
which to this day remains the loyallest of her Majesty's subjects. When
the Speaker ruled against his side he counselled defiance in a
resounding whisper; when an opponent was speaking he snorted
thunderous derision; when an opponent retorted he smiled blandly and
admonished him: "Ton't lose yer demper."

In the Assembly, if nowhere else, rumbled the menace of coming war.
One other feature there was that was not Capetown. Along Adderley
Street, before the steamship companies' offices, loafed a thick string of
sun-reddened, unshaven, flannel-shirted, corduroy-trousered British
working-men. Inside the offices they thronged the counters six deep.
Down to the docks they filed steadily with bundles to be penned in the
black hulls of homeward liners. Their words were few and sullen.
These were the miners of the Rand--who floated no companies, held no
shares, made no fortunes, who only wanted to make a hundred pounds
to furnish a cottage and marry a girl.
They had been turned out of work, packed in cattle-trucks, and had
come down in sun by day and icy wind by night, empty-bellied, to pack
off home again. Faster than the ship-loads could steam out the
trainloads steamed in. They choked the lodging-houses, the bars, the
streets. Capetown was one huge demonstration of the unemployed. In
the hotels and streets wandered the pale, distracted employers. They
hurried hither and thither and arrived nowhither; they let their cigars go
out, left their glasses half full, broke off their talk in the middle of a
word. They spoke now of intolerable grievance and hoarded revenge,
now of silent mines, rusting machinery, stolen gold. They held their
houses in Johannesburg as gone beyond the reach of insurance. They
hated Capetown, they could not tear themselves away to England, they
dared not return to the Rand.
This little quiet corner of Capetown held the throbbing hopes and fears
of all Johannesburg and more than half the two Republics and the mass
of all South Africa.
None doubted--though many tried to doubt--that at last it was--war!
They paused an instant before they said the word, and spoke it softly. It
had come at last--the moment they had worked and waited for--and
they knew not whether to exult or to despair.

II.

THE ARMY CORPS--HAS NOT LEFT ENGLAND!
A LITTLE PATCH OF WHITE TENTS--A DREAM OF
DISTANCE--THE DESERT OF THE KARROO--WAR AT LAST--A
CAMPAIGN WITHOUT HEADQUARTERS--WAITING FOR THE
ARMY CORPS.
STORMBERG JUNCTION.
The wind screams down from the naked hills on to the little junction
station. A platform with dining-room and telegraph office, a few
corrugated iron sheds, the station-master's corrugated iron
bungalow--and there is nothing else of Stormberg but veldt and, kopje,
wind and sky. Only these last day's there has sprung up a little patch of
white tents a quarter of a mile from the station, and about them move
men in putties and khaki. Signal flags blink from the rises, pickets with
fixed bayonets dot the ridges, mounted men in couples patrol the plain
and the dip and the slope. Four companies of the Berkshire Regiment
and the mounted infantry section--in all they may count 400 men. Fifty
miles north is the Orange river, and beyond it, maybe by now this side
of it, thousands of armed and mounted burghers--and war.
I wonder if it is all real? By the clock I have been travelling something
over forty hours in South Africa, but it might just as well be a minute or
a lifetime. It is a minute of experience prolonged to a lifetime. South
Africa is a dream--one of those dreams in which you live years in the
instant of waking--a dream of distance.
Departing from Capetown by night, I awoke in the Karroo. Between
nine and six in the morning we had made less than a hundred and
eighty miles. Now we were