From Capetown to Ladysmith | Page 5

no field-guns. The
Boer force available against these isolated positions might be very
reasonably put at 12,000 mounted infantry, with perhaps a score of
guns.
Mafeking and Kimberley are fairly well garrisoned, with auxiliary
volunteers, and may hold their own: at any rate, I have not been there
and can say nothing about them. But along the southern border of the
Free State--the three railway junctions of De Aar, Naauwpoort, and
Stormberg--our position is very dangerous indeed. I say it freely, for by
the time the admission reaches England it may be needed to explain
failure, or pleasant to add lustre to success. If the Army Corps were in

Africa, which is still in England, this position would be a splendid one
for it--three lines of supply from Capetown, Port Elizabeth, and East
London, and three converging lines of advance by Norval's Pont,
Bethulie, and Aliwal North. But with tiny forces of half a battalion in
front and no support behind--nothing but long lines of railway with
ungarrisoned ports hundreds of miles at the far end of them--it is very
dangerous. There are at this moment no supports nearer than England.
Let the Free Staters bring down two thousand good shots and resolute
men to-morrow morning--it is only fifty miles, with two lines of
railway--and what will happen to that little patch of white tents by the
station? The loss of any one means the loss of land connection between
Western and Eastern Provinces, a line open into the heart of the Cape
Colony, and nothing to resist an invader short of the sea.
It is dangerous--and yet nobody cares. There is nothing to do but
wait--for the Army Corps that has not yet left England. Even to-day--a
day's ride from the frontier--the war seems hardly real. All will be done
that man can do. In the mean time the good lady of the
refreshment-room says: "Dinner? There's been twenty-one to-day and
dinner got ready for fifteen; but you're welcome to it, such as it is. We
must take things as they come in war-time." Her children play with
their cats in the passage. The railway man busies himself about the new
triangles and sidings that are to be laid down against the beginning of
December for the Army Corps that has not yet left England.

III.
A PASTOR'S POINT OF VIEW.
AN IDEAL OF ARCADY--REBEL BURGHERSDORP--ITS
MONUMENTS--DOPPER THEOLOGY--AN INTERVIEW WITH
ONE OF ITS PROFESSORS.
BURGHERSDORP, _Oct. 14._
The village lies compact and clean-cut, a dot in the wilderness. No

fields or orchards break the transition from man to nature; step out of
the street and you are at once on rock-ribbed kopje or raw veldt. As you
stand on one of the bare lines of hill that squeeze it into a narrow valley,
Burghersdorp is a chequer-board of white house, green tree, and grey
iron roof; beyond its edges everything is the changeless yellow brown
of South African landscape.
Go down into the streets, and Burghersdorp is an ideal of Arcady. The
broad, dusty, unmetalled roads are steeped in sunshine. The houses are
all one-storeyed, some brick, some mud, some the eternal corrugated
iron, most faced with whitewash, many fronted with shady verandahs.
As blinds against the sun they have lattices of trees down every
street--white-blossoming laburnum, poplars, sycamores.
Despite verandahs and trees, the sunshine soaks down into every
corner--genially, languorously warm. All Burghersdorp basks. You see
half-a-dozen yoke of bullocks with a waggon, standing placidly in the
street, too lazy even to swish their tails against the flies; pass by an
hour later, and they are still there, and the black man lounging by the
leaders has hardly shifted one leg; pass by at evening, and they have
moved on three hundred yards, and are resting again. In the daytime
hens peck and cackle in every street; at nightfall the bordering veldt
hums with crickets and bullfrogs. At morn come a flight of
locusts--first, yellow-white scouts whirring down every street, then a
pelting snowstorm of them high up over the houses, spangling the blue
heaven. But Burghersdorp cared nothing. "There is nothing for them,"
said a farmer, with cosy satisfaction; "the frost killed everything last
week."
British and Dutch salute and exchange the news with lazy mutual
tolerance. The British are storekeepers and men of business; the Boers
ride in from their farms. They are big, bearded men, loose of limb,
shabbily dressed in broad-brimmed hats, corduroy trousers, and brown
shoes; they sit their ponies at a rocking-chair canter erect and easy;
unkempt, rough, half-savage, their tanned faces and blue eyes express
lazy good-nature, sluggish stubbornness, dormant fierceness. They ask
the news in soft, lisping Dutch that might be a woman's; but the lazy

imperiousness of their bearing stamps them as free men. A people hard
to rouse, you say--and