As an instance of how acute was the feeling suddenly roused respecting Englishmen, I remember that Mr. Harry Lawson, who was staying in the same house as ourselves, and had decided to leave for Johannesburg as special correspondent to his father’s paper, the Daily Telegraph, was actually obliged to travel under a foreign name; and even then, if my memory serves me right, he did not succeed in reaching the Rand.  In the meantime, as the daily papers received fuller details, harrowing accounts came to hand of the exodus from Johannesburg of men, women, and children travelling twenty in a compartment meant for eight, while others, not so fortunate, had to put up with cattle-trucks.  The Boers were said to have shown themselves humane and magnanimous.  Mr. Chamberlain, the papers wrote, was strengthening the hands of the President, to avert civil war, which must have been dangerously near; but the most important man of the moment in South Africa was grudgingly admitted to be “Oom Paul.”  His personal influence alone, it was stated, had restrained his wild bands of armed burghers, with which the land was simply bristling, and he was then in close confabulation with Her Majesty’s High Commissioner, Sir Hercules Robinson, whom he had summoned to Pretoria to deal with such refractory Englishmen.  The journals also took advantage of the occasion to bid Kruger remember this was the opportunity to show himself forgiving, and to strengthen his corrupt Government, thereby earning the gratitude of those Afrikanders, for whom, indeed, he was not expected to have any affection, but to whom he was indebted for the present flourishing financial state of his republic, which, it was called to mind, was next door to bankrupt when England declared its independence in 1884.  If such articles were translated and read out to that wily old President, as he sipped his coffee on his stoep, with his bland and inscrutable smile, it must have added zest to his evening pipe.  I read in Mr. Seymour Fort’s “Life of Dr. Jameson” that the Raid cost the Chartered Company L75,000 worth of material, most of which passed into the hands of the Boer Government, while the confiscated arms at Johannesburg amounted to several thousand rifles and a great deal of ammunition.  Respecting the guns taken from Jameson’s force, curiously enough, we surmised during the siege of Mafeking, four years later, that some of these were being used against us.  Their shells fired into the town, many of which did not explode, and of which I possess a specimen, were the old seven-pound studded M.L. type, with the Woolwich mark on them.

FOOTNOTES: 

[3] Died at Groot Schuurr in September, 1905.

CHAPTER III

     The immediate results of the Raid—­the raiders themselves

     “The fly sat on the axle-tree of the chariot-wheel, and
     said, ‘What a dust do I raise!’”—­AEsop.