Note Back to Main Text — Chapter IV

Any force of irregulars which offers a prolonged resistance, not unmarked by tactical successes, to a regular army of superior strength is apt to be regarded as a phenomenon. Yet, from the earliest times, history has shown how seasoned troops may be checked by an enemy who is inferior in numbers, discipline and armament, but possessed of certain counterbalancing resources, due either to the nature of his country, to his own natural characteristics, or to a combination of both.[65] Of such resources the Boers at the close of the nineteenth century possessed, largely by inheritance, a full share. Inherited faculties. With their forefathers, the early Afrikanders, loneliness had been a passion to which their very presence north of the Orange river was due. Flying from society, from burdens and responsibilities which they considered intolerable, from pleasures which seemed to them godless, from a stir which bewildered them, and from regularity which wearied them, they had penetrated the wilds northward in bands as small as possible, each man of which was wrapped in a dream of solitude, careless whither he went so long as he went unseen. It troubled these pioneers little that they were plunging into a sea of enemies. Society, with its conventions and trammels, and most of all, perhaps, with its taxes, was the only enemy whom they feared, the only one they could never escape. But before it caught them up, their combats with corporeal foes were incessant and deadly. Wild beasts prowled round their herds; savages swooped upon their homesteads; all animated nature was in arms against them; every farmhouse was a fortress, usually in a state of siege. In the great spaces of the wilderness the cry for help was but seldom heard, or if heard, only by one who had his own safety to look to. The Boer farmer of the forties, therefore, had to work out his rescue, as he worked out every other problem of his existence, for himself, acquiring thereby, a supreme individuality and self-reliance in the presence of danger. He acquired also other characteristics. The fighting men of his nation were few in number; every mature life was little less valuable to the State than it was to the homestead whose existence depended upon it. The burgher's hope of injuring his enemy was therefore subordinated to solicitude for his own preservation, and he studied only safe methods of being dangerous. Even when in later days the Boer expeditionary bands, reclaiming to the full from the blacks the toll of blood and cruelty which had been levied on themselves, were more often the attackers than the attacked, their aggression was always tempered by the caution of the individual Boers, who would still forego a chance of striking a blow should it contain an undue element of hazard. The republican warriors relied, indeed, less on attack than on defence. They trusted yet more to that weapon, perfected by many small races which have been compelled to work out their own methods of warfare, the weapon of evasion. Nearly always outnumbered, never sure of victory, the burghers always provided, then kept their eyes continually upon, a loophole of escape, for if that were closed they felt themselves to be lost. These characteristics, with many more which will be noted, the early Boer bequeathed to his sons and grandsons; a legacy so strangely composed that many of the very qualities which brought temporary victory to the campaigners of 1899 foredoomed them to ultimate defeat.