The Boers were not without their periods of depression during the war, but when these had passed there was no one who laughed more heartily over their actions during those times than they.  The first deep gloom that the Boers experienced was after the three great defeats at Paardeberg, Kimberley and Ladysmith, and the minor reverses at Abraham’s Kraal, Poplar Grove and Bloemfontein.  It was amusing, yet pitiful, to see an army lose all control of itself and flee like a wild animal before a forest fire.  As soon as the fight at Poplar Grove was lost the burghers mounted their horses and fled northward.  President Kruger and the officers could do nothing but follow them.  They passed through Bloemfontein and excited the population there; then, evading roads and despising railway transportation, they rode straight across the veld and never drew rein until they reached Brandfort, more than thirty miles from Poplar Grove.  Hundreds did not stop even at Brandfort, but continued over the veld until they reached their homes in the north of the Free State and in the Transvaal.  In their alarm they destroyed all the railway bridges and tracks as far north as Smaldeel, sixty miles from Bloemfontein, and made their base at Kroonstad, almost forty miles farther north.  A week later a small number of the more daring burghers sallied toward Bloemfontein and found that not a single British soldier was north of that city.  So fearful were they of the British army before the discovery of their foolish flight that two thousand cavalrymen could have sent them all across the Vaal river.

APPENDIX

THE STRENGTH OF THE BOER ARMY

The War Departments of the two Boer Governments never made any provision for obtaining statistics concerning the strength of the armies in the field, and consequently the exact number of burghers who bore arms at different periods of the war will never be accurately known.  A year before the war was begun the official reports of the two Governments stated that the Transvaal had thirty thousand and the Free State ten thousand men between the ages of sixteen and sixty, capable of performing military duties, but these figures proved to be far in excess of the number of men who were actually bearing arms at any one period of the war.  In the early stages of the war men who claimed to have intimate knowledge of Boer affairs estimated the strength of the Republican armies variously from sixty thousand to more than one hundred thousand men.  Major Laing, who had years of South African military experience, and became a member of Field-Marshal Lord Roberts’s bodyguard, in December estimated the strength of the Boer forces at more than one hundred thousand men, exclusive of the foreigners who joined the fortunes of the Republican armies.  Other men proved, with wondrous arrays of figures and statistics, that the Boer army could not possibly consist of less than eighty or ninety thousand men.