of the victorious defenders.  At the end of seventeen days of mud and blood the brave irregulars saw an empty laager and abandoned trenches.  Their own resistance and the advance of Brabant to their rescue had caused a hasty retreat of the enemy.  Wepener, Mafeking, Kimberley, the taking of the first guns at Ladysmith, the deeds of the Imperial Light Horse—­it cannot be denied that our irregular South African forces have a brilliant record for the war.  They are associated with many successes and with few disasters.  Their fine record cannot, I think, be fairly ascribed to any greater hardihood which one portion of our race has when compared with another, for a South African must admit that in the best colonial corps at least half the men were Britons of Britain.  In the Imperial Light Horse the proportion was very much higher.  But what may fairly be argued is that their exploits have proved, what the American war proved long ago, that the German conception of discipline is an obsolete fetish, and that the spirit of free men, whose individualism has been encouraged rather than crushed, is equal to any feat of arms.  The clerks and miners and engineers who went up Elandslaagte Hill without bayonets, shoulder to shoulder with the Gordons, and who, according to Sir George White, saved Ladysmith on January 6th, have shown for ever that with men of our race it is the spirit within, and not the drill or the discipline, that makes a formidable soldier.  An intelligent appreciation of the fact might in the course of the next few years save us as much money as would go far to pay for the war.

It may well be asked how for so long a period as seventeen days the British could tolerate a force to the rear of them when with their great superiority of numbers they could have readily sent an army to drive it away.  The answer must be that Lord Roberts had despatched his trusty lieutenant, Kitchener, to Aliwal, whence he had been in heliographic communication with Wepener, that he was sure that the place could hold out, and that he was using it, as he did Kimberley, to hold the enemy while he was making his plans for their destruction.  This was the bait to tempt them to their ruin.  Had the trap not been a little slow in closing, the war in the Free State might have ended then and there.  From the 9th to the 25th the Boers were held in front of Wepener.  Let us trace the movements of the other British detachments during that time.

Brabant’s force, with Hart’s brigade, which had been diverted on its way to Kimberley, where it was to form part of Hunter’s division, was moving on the south towards Wepener, advancing through Rouxville, but going slowly for fear of scaring the Boers away before they were sufficiently compromised.  Chermside’s 3rd division approached from the north-west, moving out from the railway at Bethany, and passing through Reddersberg towards Dewetsdorp, from which it would directly threaten the Boer line of retreat.  The movement was made with reassuring slowness and gentleness, as when the curved hand approaches the unconscious fly.  And then suddenly, on April 21st, Lord Roberts let everything go.  Had the action of the agents been as swift and as energetic as the mind of the planner, De Wet could not have escaped us.