was to train the members in the use of the rifle so that they might defend the city against the enemy.  The club members took great pride in the fact that Mrs. Paul Kruger was the President of the organisation, and it was mutually agreed that the aged woman should be constantly guarded by them in the event of Pretoria being besieged.  Happily the city was not obliged to experience that horror, and the club members were spared the ordeal of protecting President and Mrs. Kruger with their rifles as they had vowed to do.

The Boer women endured many discomforts, suffered many griefs, and bore many heartaches on account of the war and its varying fortunes, but throughout it all they acted bravely.  There were no wild outbursts of grief when fathers, husbands, brothers or sons were killed in battle, and no untoward exclamations of joy when one of them earned distinction in the field.  Reverses of the army were made the occasions for a renewed display of patriotism or the signal for the sending of another relative to the field.  Unselfishness marked all the works of the woman of the city or veld, and the welfare of the country was her only ambition.  She might have had erroneous opinions concerning the justice of the war and the causes which were responsible for it, but she realised that the land for which her mother and her grandmother had wept and bled and for which all those whom she loved were fighting and dying was in distress, and she was patriotic enough to offer herself for a sacrifice on her country’s altar.

[Illustration:  MRS. COMMANDANT-GENERAL LOUIS BOTHA]

CHAPTER XI

INCIDENTS OF THE WAR

In every battle, and even in a day’s life in the laagers, there were multitudes of interesting incidents as only such a war produces, and although Sherman’s saying that “War is hell” is as true now as it ever was, there was always a plenitude of amusing spectacles and events to lighten the burdens of the fighting burghers.  There were the sad sides of warfare, as naturally there would be, but to these the men in the armies soon became hardened, and only the amusing scenes made any lasting impression upon their minds.  It was strange that when a burgher during a battle saw one of his fellow-burghers killed in a horrible manner, and witnessed an amusing runaway, that after the battle he should relate the details of the latter and say nothing of the former, but such was usually the case.  Men came out of the bloody Spion Kop fight and related amusing incidents of the struggle, and never touched upon the grave phases until long afterward when their fund of laughable experiences was exhausted.  After the battle of Sannaspost the burghers would tell of nothing but the amusing manner in which the drivers of the British transport waggons acted when they found that they had fallen into the hands of the Boers in the bed of the spruit and the fun they had in pursuing the fleeing cavalrymen.  At the ending of almost every battle there was some conspicuous amusing incident which was told and retold and laughed about until a new and fresh incident came to light to take its place.