With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and BackLowry, Edward P.
History
With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back
Lowry, Edward P.
South African War, 1899-1902 -- Personal narratives
Napoleon, with possibly a veiled reference to himself, once said to
the French people, "You have the men, but where is _The Man_?" The
Boers in the day of their uprising against British rule found "The
Man" in PAUL STEPHANUS KRUGER. To all South Africa a veritable "man of
Destiny" has he proved to be; and for eighteen successive years, as
their honoured President he has ruled his people with an absoluteness
no European potentate could possibly approach. By birth a British
subject, and for a brief while after the annexation a paid official of
the British Government, he yet seems all his life to have been a
consistent hater of all things British. When only ten years old, a
tattered, bare-legged, unlettered lad, he joined "The great Trek"
which in 1837 sought on the dangerous and dreary veldt beyond the Vaal
a refuge from British rule. He it was who, surviving the terrors of
those tragic times and trained in that stern school, became like Brand
and Burgers a dreamer of dreams. He lived to baffle by his superior
shrewdness, or slimness, all the arts of English diplomacy. In his
later years this President manifestly deemed himself chosen of Heaven
to make an end of British rule from the Zambesi to the sea. "The
Transvaal shall never be shut up in a kraal," said he. A Sovereign
International State he declared it was, or should be, with free access
to the ocean; and how astonishingly near he came to the accomplishment
of these bold aims we now know to our exceeding cost. Nevertheless, to
this persistent dreamer of dreams the two South African Republics owe
their extinction; while the British Empire owes to him more than to
any other living man its fast approaching Federation.
With surprising secrecy and success the Transvaal officials prepared
for the inevitable conflict which the attempted fulfilment of such
bold dreams involved, and in that preparation were rendered essential
aid, first by the discovery, not far from Pretoria, of the richest
goldfield in the whole world, which soon provided them with the
necessary means; and next by the Jameson Raid, which provided them
with the necessary excuse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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