No greater or harder work was done by the women during the entire war than that which fell to their lot immediately following the formal declaration of war by the authorities.  In the excitement of the occasion the Government had neglected to make any satisfactory arrangements for supplying the burghers with food while on the journey to the front and afterward, and consequently there was much suffering from lack of provisions and supplies.  At this juncture the women came to the rescue, and in a trice they had remedied the great defect.  Every farmhouse and every city residence became a bakery, and for almost two months all the bread consumed by the burgher army was prepared by the Boer women.  Organisations were formed for this purpose in every city and town in the country, and by means of a well-planned division of labour this improvised commissariat department was as effective as that which was afterward organised by the Government.  Certain women baked the bread, prepared sandwiches, and boiled coffee; others procured the supplies, and others distributed the food at the various railway stations through which the commando-trains passed, or carried it directly to the laagers.  One of the women who was tireless in her efforts to feed the burghers and make them comfortable as they passed through Pretoria on the railway was Mrs. F.W.  Reitz, the wife of the Transvaal State Secretary, and never a commando-train passed through the capital that she was not there to distribute sandwiches, coffee, and milk.

When the first battles of the campaign had been fought and the wounded were being brought from the front the women again volunteered to relieve an embarrassed Government, and no nobler, more energetic efforts to relieve suffering were ever made than those of the patriotic daughters of the Transvaal and Orange Free State.  Women from the farms assisted in the hospitals; wives who directed the herding of cattle during the absence of their husbands went to the towns and to the laager hospitals; young school girls deserted their books and assisted in giving relief to the burghers who were bullet-maimed or in the delirium of fever.  No station in life was unrepresented in the humanitarian work.  Two daughters of the former President of the Transvaal, the Rev. Thomas Francois Burgers, were nurses in the Burke hospital in Pretoria, which was established and maintained by a Boer burgher.  Miss Martha Meyer, a daughter of General Lucas Meyer, devoted herself assiduously to the relief of the wounded in the same hospitals, and in the institution which Barney Barnato established in Johannesburg there were scores of young women nurses who cared for British and Boer wounded with unprejudiced attention.  In every laager at the front were young Boer vrouwen who, under the protection of the Red Cross, and indifferent, to the creed, caste, or country of the wounded and dying, assuaged the suffering of those who were entrusted to their care.  In the hospital-trains which carried the wounded from the battlefields to the hospitals in Pretoria and Johannesburg were Boer women who considered themselves particularly fortunate in having been able to secure posts where they could be of service, while at the stations where the trains halted were Boer women bearing baskets of fruit and bottles of milk for the unfortunate burghers and soldiers in the carriages.