The Petticoat Commando | Page 3

the capital.
This historical place consisted of a simple, comfortable farm-house,
with a rambling garden--a romantic spot, and an ideal setting for the
adventures and enterprises here recorded.
At the time our story opens, the owner, Mrs. van Warmelo, was living
alone on it with her daughter, Hansie, a girl of twenty-two, the diarist
referred to in the Introduction.
The other members of the family, though they took no part in those
events of the war which took place within the capital, were so closely
connected with the principal figures in this book that their introduction
will be necessary here.
The family consisted of five, two daughters and three sons. The elder
daughter was married and was living at Wynberg near Cape Town, the
younger, as we have seen, was with her mother in Pretoria during the
war, while of the sons, two, the eldest and the youngest, Dietlof and
Fritz, were on commando, having left the capital with the first
contingent of volunteers on September 28th.
The third brother, Willem, who had been studying in Holland when the
war broke out, had, with his mother's knowledge and permission, given
up his nearly completed studies and had come to South Africa, to take
part in the deadly struggle in which his fellow-countrymen were
engaged.

In order to achieve his purpose, he had taken the only route open to him,
the eastern route through Delagoa Bay, and had joined his brothers in
the field, after a brief sojourn with his mother and sister at Harmony.
Considering the circumstances under which he had joined the Boer
forces and the sacrifice he had made for love of fatherland, it was
particularly sad that he should have been made a prisoner at the last
great fight at the Tugela, the battle of Pieter's Height in Natal, on
February 27th, after a very short experience of commando life.
He was lodged in the Maritzburg jail at this time, where things would
have gone hard with him, but for the loving-kindness of his cousin,
Miss Berning, now Lady Bale, who frequently visited him with her
sister, and provided him with baskets of fruit and other delicacies,
which helped greatly to brighten the long months of his imprisonment.
Later on, through the influence of his brother-in-law, Mr. Henry Cloete,
of "Alphen," Wynberg, he was released on parole, and allowed to
return to Holland to complete his studies. His name therefore will no
more appear in these pages.
He was "out of action" once and for all, and could not be made use of,
even when, later on, through the development of the events with which
this book deals, his services were most required by his mother and
sister.
The other two brothers, as we have said, had left Pretoria with the first
volunteers.
It is strange that the first blood shed in that terrible war should have
been that of a young Boer accidentally shot by a comrade.
As a train, laden with its burden of brave and hopeful burghers,
steamed slowly through the cutting on the south-eastern side of Pretoria,
volleys of farewell shots were fired.
It is customary to extract the bullets from the cartridges on such
occasions, but one of the burghers must have omitted to do this, with

the result that the bullet, rebounding from the rocks, penetrated a
carriage window, and seriously wounded one of the occupants.
Was this event prophetic of a later development of the war, when, as
we shall see, Boer shed the blood of brother Boer in the formation of
the National Scouts Corps?
Mrs. van Warmelo was a "voor-trekker," a pioneer, in every sense of
the word. As a girl of fourteen she had left Natal with her parents and
had "trekked," with other families, through the wild waste of country,
into the unknown and barbaric regions in which she was destined to
spend her youth.
She had watched the growth of a new country, the building up of a new
race. She had known all the hardships and dangers of life in an
unsettled and uncivilised land, had been through a number of Kaffir
wars and could speak, through personal experience, of many adventures
with savage foes and wild beasts. Her children knew her stories by
heart, and it is not to be wondered at that they grew up with the love of
adventure strong in them. And above all things, they grew up with a
strong love for the strange, rich, wild country for which their
forefathers had fought and suffered.
Mrs. van Warmelo was the eldest daughter of a family of sixteen. Her
father, Dietlof Siegfried Maré, for many years Landdrost of
Zoutpansberg, that northern territory of the Transvaal, was a direct
descendant of the Huguenot fugitives, and was a typical Frenchman,
short of stature, dark,