CHAPTER IV.

THE BOER ARMY.

Many

previous

cases

compare

with

Boer

resistance.

Inherited

faculties.

Any force of irregulars which offers a prolonged resistance, not unmarked by tactical successes, to a regular army of superior strength is apt to be regarded as a phenomenon. Yet, from the earliest times, history has shown how seasoned troops may be checked by an enemy who is inferior in numbers, discipline and armament, but possessed of certain counterbalancing resources, due either to the nature of his country, to his own natural characteristics, or to a combination of both.* Of such resources the Boers at the close of the nineteenth century possessed, largely by inheritance, a full share. With their forefathers, the early Afrikanders, loneliness had been a passion to which their very presence north of the Orange river was due. Flying from society, from burdens and responsibilities which they considered intolerable, from pleasures which seemed to them godless, from a stir which bewildered them, and from regularity which wearied them, they had penetrated the wilds northward in bands as small as possible, each man of which was wrapped in a dream of solitude, careless whither he went so long as he went unseen. It troubled these pioneers little that they were plunging into a sea of enemies. Society, with its conventions and trammels, and most of all, perhaps, with its taxes, was the only enemy whom they feared, the only one they could never escape. But before it caught them up, their combats with corporeal foes

* E.G ., the revolt of La Vendée, the resistance of the Maories, the Red Indians, the Achinese, the Montenegrins, of the Trans-Indus Highlanders, of Andreas Hofer’s Tyrolese, of Shamyl’s Caucasians.