The last request was rather superfluous in view of the fact that the majority of the women in the Transvaal were already provided with arms. There was hardly a Boer homestead which was not provided with enough rifles for all the members of the family, and there were but few women who were not adepts in the use of firearms. In Pretoria a woman's shooting club was organised at the outset of the war, and among the best shots were the Misses Eloff, the President's grand-daughters; Mrs. Van Alphen, the wife of the Postmaster-General, and Mrs. Reitz, the wife of the State Secretary. The object of the organisation was to train the members in the use of the rifle so that they might defend the city against the enemy. The club members took great pride in the fact that Mrs. Paul Kruger was the President of the organisation, and it was mutually agreed that the aged woman should be constantly guarded by them in the event of Pretoria being besieged. Happily the city was not obliged to experience that horror, and the club members were spared the ordeal of protecting President and Mrs. Kruger with their rifles as they had vowed to do. The Boer women endured many discomforts, suffered many griefs, and bore many heartaches on account of the war and its varying fortunes, but throughout it all they acted bravely. There were no wild outbursts of grief when fathers, husbands, brothers or sons were killed in battle, and no untoward exclamations of joy when one of them earned distinction in the field. Reverses of the army were made the occasions for a renewed display of patriotism or the signal for the sending of another relative to the field. Unselfishness marked all the works of the woman of the city or veld, and the welfare of the country was her only ambition. She might have had erroneous opinions concerning the justice of the war and the causes which were responsible for it, but she realised that the land for which her mother and her grandmother had wept and bled and for which all those whom she loved were fighting and dying was in distress, and she was patriotic enough to offer herself for a sacrifice on her country's altar. [Illustration: MRS. COMMANDANT-GENERAL LOUIS BOTHA] CHAPTER XI INCIDENTS OF THE WAR