to the trenches along the Tugela front, and it was asserted, with every evidence of veracity, that many of them used the rifles against the enemy with even more ardour and precision than the men.  On February 28th, while the fighting around Pieter’s Hills was at its height, the British forces captured a Boer woman of nineteen years who had been fatally wounded.  Before she died she stated that she had been fighting from the same trench with her husband, and that he had been killed only a few minutes before a bullet struck her.

While the Boer army was having its many early successes in Natal few of the women partook in the actual warfare from choice, or because they believed that it was necessary for them to fight.  The majority of those who were in the engagements happened to be with their husbands when the battles were begun, and had no opportunity of escaping.  The burghers objected to the presence of women within the firing lines, and every effort was made to prevent them from being in dangerous localities, but when it was impossible to transfer them to places of safety during the heat of the battle there was no alternative but to provide them with rifles and bandoliers so that they might protect themselves.  The half-hundred women who endured the horrors of the siege at Paardeberg with Cronje’s small band of warriors chose to remain with their husbands and brothers when Lord Roberts offered to convey them to places of safety, but they were in no wise an impediment to the burghers, for they assisted in digging trenches and wielded the carbines as assiduously as the most energetic men.

[Illustration:  MRS. OTTO KRANTZ, A BOER AMAZON]

One of the women who received the Government’s sanction to join a commando was Mrs. Otto Krantz, the wife of a professional hunter.  Mrs. Krantz accompanied her husband to Natal at the commencement of hostilities, and remained in the field during almost the entire campaign in that colony.  In the battle of Elandslaagte, where some of the hardest hand-to-hand fighting of the war occurred, this Amazon was by the side of her husband in the thick of the engagement, but escaped unscathed.  Later she took part in the battles along the Tugela, and when affairs in the Free State appeared to be threatening she was one of the first to go to the scene of action in that part of the country.

Among the prisoners captured by the British forces at Colesburg were three Boer women who wore men’s clothing, but it was not until after they had been confined in the prison-ship at Cape Town for several weeks that their sex was discovered.  A real little Boertje was Helena Herbst Wagner, of Zeerust, who spent five months in the laagers and in the trenches without her identity being revealed.  Her husband went to the field early in the war and left her alone with a baby.  The infant died in January and the disconsolate woman donned her husband’s clothing, obtained a rifle and bandolier, and went to the Natal front to search for her soldier-spouse.  Failing to find him, she joined the forces of Commandant Ben Viljoen and faced bullets, bombs, and lyddite at Spion Kop, Pont Drift, and Pieter’s Hills.  During the retreat to Van Tonder’s Nek the young woman learned that her husband lay seriously wounded in the Johannesburg hospital, and she deserted the army temporarily to nurse him.