At Prieska I met Maritz, then a Major, and Commandant of the Defence Force in charge of the North-West Districts. I had heard much of the man, of his courage and strength, and his dare-devil exploits when with the Boer forces during the Anglo-Boer War, also of his doings in German South-West Africa, whither he had migrated, like many another “irreconcilable” after Vereeniging. There he had been transport officer for the Germans during the Hottentot and Herero Rebellion, and had become far more Germanised than most of the freedom-loving Boers who had tried to make a home in that country, the majority of whom had soon been extremely glad to get back once again to British rule. But the hectoring, bullying manners of the German officers were apparently much to the taste of “Maanie,” and when at the formation of the Union Defence Force he returned to the Union and soon blossomed forth as a Major in command of the North-West District of the Cape Province (the wild region bordering German territory), he soon showed the _jongen_ who came under his sway that the days of the old, easy going commando system of their fathers was a thing of the past, and that rigid discipline had come in place of it. He soon became a perfect terror to them, and many a tale had I heard at Keimoos, where the Upington men had gone for training, as to the shock he had given many a young Boer who, fresh from the lonely farms of the back-veldt, had thought to treat him as an equal. But, martinet as he had become, and feared as he was by them, he undoubtedly won the respect of these ignorant and impressionable young fellows, many of whom had never seen a railway or heard anything of the outside world, except from the biased and embittered lips of the irreconcilables and so-called “Hertzogites” (or Nationalists) who formed the bulk of the scattered population in these remote regions. To his men his great argument was that by discipline alone could they ever become a fighting force worthy of the name, and that, had the Boer forces been properly disciplined, the British could never have won the war. Whatever may have been his faults, Maritz was no hypocrite; he never professed to have any other feeling than that of hearty detestation for the English; and though the Union Jack floated over his training-camp, there can be no doubt that he hoped from the first that in the Defence Force he was helping to forge a weapon that would some day be turned against the _Uitlander_ whose hated symbol it was.