It was fortunate I had not accompanied De Koker, for that very evening back came Mr. Keeley, who had luckily succeeded in satisfying the suspicions of General Snyman, and who had received a permit to reside on his farm during the war.  He brought me a letter in Dutch from the same authority, refusing, “owing to the disturbed state of the country,” to give me a pass to Mafeking, and requesting me to remain where I was, under the “surveillance of his burghers.”  It was exactly the surveillance of one of his said burghers I wished to avoid; but there seemed no possibility of getting rid of Dietrich, who evidently preferred his comfortable quarters at the hotel to roughing it in the laager.  I was exceedingly disappointed, and also somewhat indignant with Mr. Keeley, who firmly believed, and was much cast down by, some telegrams he had read out in the laager, relating the utter defeat of 15,000 English at the Modder River;[31] 1,500 Boers, he stated, had surrounded this force, of which they had killed 2,000.  I stoutly refused to credit it till I had seen it in an English despatch.  But all this was enough to subdue the bravest spirit; we had received practically nothing but Dutch information during the last six weeks, telling of their successes and English disasters; we had seen nobody but our enemies.  Even if one did not allow oneself to believe their tales, there was always a sort of uncomfortable feeling that these must contain some element of truth.  Fortunately, however, I was reading an account of the Franco-German War in 1870, and there I found that the same system of inventing successes was carried on by the French press right up to, and even after, the Emperor’s capitulation at Sedan.  So it was comforting to think that, if it had been necessary to keep up the spirits of paid and regular soldiers, it must be a thousand times more essential for the Transvaal authorities to do so, as regards their unpaid mixed army, who had no encouragement to fight but knowledge of successes and hopes of future loot.  All the same, it was a great trial of patience.

FOOTNOTES: 

[31] This news must have been a garbled account of the fighting with Lord Methuen’s column.

CHAPTER IX

     HOW I WAS MADE A PRISONER—­IN A BOER LAAGER

     “Ah, there, Piet! be’ind ’is stony kop,
     With ‘is Boer bread an’ biltong, an’ ’is flask of awful dop;
     ‘Is mauser for amusement an’ ’is pony for retreat,
     I’ve known a lot o’ fellers shoot a dam’ sight worse than
     Piet.”—­KIPLING.