The men might, by all accounts, be divided into two very different types.  There were the town Boers, smartened and perhaps a little enervated by prosperity and civilisation, men of business and professional men, more alert and quicker than their rustic comrades.  These men spoke English rather than Dutch, and indeed there were many men of English descent among them.  But the others, the most formidable both in their numbers and in their primitive qualities, were the back-veld Boers, the sunburned, tangle-haired, full-bearded farmers, the men of the Bible and the rifle, imbued with the traditions of their own guerrilla warfare.  These were perhaps the finest natural warriors upon earth, marksmen, hunters, accustomed to hard fare and a harder couch.  They were rough in their ways and speech, but, in spite of many calumnies and some few unpleasant truths, they might compare with most disciplined armies in their humanity and their desire to observe the usages of war.

A few words here as to the man who led this singular host.  Piet Joubert was a Cape Colonist by birth—­a fellow countryman, like Kruger himself, of those whom the narrow laws of his new country persisted in regarding as outside the pale.  He came from that French Huguenot blood which has strengthened and refined every race which it has touched, and from it he derived a chivalry and generosity which made him respected and liked even by his opponents.  In many native broils and in the British campaign of 1881 he had shown himself a capable leader.  His record in standing out for the independence of the Transvaal was a very consistent one, for he had not accepted office under the British, as Kruger had done, but had remained always an irreconcilable.  Tall and burly, with hard grey eyes and a grim mouth half hidden by his bushy beard, he was a fine type of the men whom he led.  He was now in his sixty-fifth year, and the fire of his youth had, as some of the burghers urged, died down within him; but he was experienced, crafty, and warwise, never dashing and never brilliant, but slow, steady, solid, and inexorable.

Besides this northern army there were two other bodies of burghers converging upon Natal.  One, consisting of the commandoes from Utrecht and the Swaziland districts, had gathered at Vryheid on the flank of the British position at Dundee.  The other, much larger, not less probably than six or seven thousand men, were the contingent from the Free State and a Transvaal corps, together with Schiel’s Germans, who were making their way through the various passes, the Tintwa Pass, and Van Reenen’s Pass, which lead through the grim range of the Drakensberg and open out upon the more fertile plains of Western Natal.  The total force may have been something between twenty and thirty thousand men.  By all accounts they were of an astonishingly high heart, convinced that a path of easy victory lay before them, and that nothing could bar their way to the sea.  If the British commanders underrated their opponents, there is ample evidence that the mistake was reciprocal.