without ever having read a book on the subject or without having had the benefit of any instruction.  The entrenchments began at a point a few miles east of the British outposts and continued for miles and miles north-east and north-west to the very apex of the Biggarsberg.  Spruits and rivers were connected by means of trenches so that a large Boer force could travel many miles without being observed by the enemy, and the series of entrenchments was fashioned in such a manner that the Boers could retreat to the highest point of the mountains and remain meanwhile in perfect concealment.  Near the top of the mountain long schanzes or walls were built to offer a place of security for the burghers, while on the top were miles of walls to attract and to inveigle the enemy to approach the lower wall more closely.  The plan was magnificent, but the British forces evaded the Biggarsberg in their advance movements, and the entrenchments were never bathed in human blood.

[Illustration:  COMMANDANT-GENERAL CHRISTIAN H. DE WET]

When the Boers in the Free State were unable to stem the advance of the British, General Meyer was compelled to retreat northward to ensure his own safety, but he did it so slowly and systematically that he lost only a few men and was able, now and then, to make bold dashes at the enemy’s flying columns with remarkable success.  The retreat northward through the Transvaal was fraught with many harassments, but General Meyer joined forces with General Botha east of Pretoria and thereafter the teacher and pupil again fought hand in hand in a common cause.

The Free State was not as prolific of generals as the Transvaal, but in Christian De Wet she had one of the ablest as well as one of the most fearless leaders in the Republican ranks.  Before he was enlisted to fight for his country De Wet was a farmer, who had a penchant for dealing in potatoes, and his only military training was secured when he was one of the sixty Boer volunteers who ascended the slopes of Majuba Hill in 1881.  There was nothing of the military in his appearance; in fact, Christian De Wet, Commandant-General of the Orange Free State in 1900, was not a whit unlike Christian De Wet, butcher of Barberton of 1879, and men who knew him in the gold-rush days of that mining town declared that he was more martial in appearance then as a licensed slayer of oxen than later as a licensed slayer of men.  He himself prided himself on his unmilitary exterior, and it was not a little source of satisfaction to him to say that his fighting regalia was the same suit of clothing which he wore on his farm on the day that he left it to fight as a soldier in his country’s army.