A CAPE LETTER.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XXVI, Issue 8703, 23 December 1899, Page 4

A CAPE LETTER.

THE CENSORSHIP.

A TAX UPON PATIENCE.

ANXIETY FOR NEWS.

THE BOMBARDING OPERATIONS.

[Sydney Daily Telegraph.]

Capetown, Nov. 18.

If there was a week in which the virtues of patience and faith were necessary (and we have seen plenty such), it has been that whioh ends to-day. Look at the position ! General Buller has been here a fortnight; the transports long expeoted have come at last, and have been pouring troopß and armaments into the country. We know in a vague way that brigades of Guards have been added to the gathering army at the Orange river, that the frontier has been reinforced, thatlaige bodies of troops have been sent up to the relief of Lady smith ; all this, and yet neither Mafekiug,

Kimberley, nor Ladysmith hare been - relieved from tbeir perilous positions, and - to all appearances the Boers are having it all their own way. So much does this appear to be the case from the Boer point of view that they have actually annexed British territory almost equal in area to that whioh they already own, and profess to be on their way to fulfil the promise with which they started the war — that they would drive the British into the sea. In the face of all this we are assured on the highest military authority that it U all right. The Boers, they say, are simply playing into our hands, and are courting the disaster which is to bring them to our feet. Well, it may be all right, but it is extremely hard to believe, and tliiß is where the trial of faith comes in. THE MILITARY CENSOESHIP. Then as to patience. Only a - Bmall modicum of news is allowed to reach us in South Africa. It may be, and no doubt is, a military necessity to keep us in the dark ; but the fact remains that the great British publio out of South Africa, whether in Great Britain or in the colonies, are at present infinitely better informed on the events of the war than we are who actually live on the spot ; or, to put it in another way, although a few of us are allowed to know things, we only know them in order to keep them in our own breasts, and to divulge them is to court death for high treason. This is where the patience comes in. We are told that the censorship will be relaxed as soon as reinforcements have arrived and the tables of the invasion are turned upon the Republics. All 1 can say is that if this does not soon happen, faith will disappear like a dream in the night, and patience will have burst all bounds. The actual facts are that the Boers are crowding around the Beleaguered towns. Beyond that we know extremely little. The news dribbles through the censor's office or by tortuous means devised by cunning correspondents. All that this amounts to is that there is a kind of guerilla warfare proceeding around each ofjjthe centres named. OHIRPtf LITTLE MESSAGES. The artillery duel, which has now lasted a fortnight, goes on between the beleaguered garrison at Ladysmith, and the Boers on the mountains by which the devoted little town is surrounded, without much damage, I fancy, on either side. We get chirpy little messages every now and then, smuggled through Estcourl, and from these we gather that while the bombardment goes on the inhabitants and their defenders livo in the bowels of the earth, which has been hollowed out for their reception. At Mafeking much the same sort of thing is in progress, and the two towns are alike in this also, that every now and again, wheu the Boers encroach upon the lines, they are attacked and driven from their foothold with more or less loss. Kimberley, by means of its splendid searchlight, flashed word right down to Hopetown the other night, and our hearts were gladdened by a cheery message. 0 fit the day when Methuen's columu, it this moment concentrating on Kimherlcy, will ba able to clear the country of the ever-threatening enemy, and give such an account of them as to make them beware how they stir up the British lion any more. THE ENEMY AVOIDS THE OPEN. The worst of it is that it seems impossible

to get the Boers into the open. lam not surprised at this, because with their primitive equipment aud knowledge oi tactics, they would be swept off the face of the earth under the scientific attack of British arms. Seldom, if over, has there been so clear a case of " mind opposing matter." It is not the British alone to whom the tedious progress of the war is trying. If we suffer, the Boers must Buffer still more. In their wimps there is an almost entire absence of equipmont, aud their transport is the too primitive ox-waggon— that is, when, as is the case generally, they are away from the railways. Reports reach that they are already Buffering from lack of ammunition, which is apt to give out at a critical point, and from lack of food, which is tardy in its arrival, as well as uncertain, owing to the extremely imperfect organisation. THE CERTAIN END. Meanwhile, the end of the struggle remains as certain that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. From the peculiar style of warfare adopted by the enemy, the process of annexation may be long and tedious, and it will be well into the new year before actual hostilities are over and a settlement of the country begins, but nbout one thing there remains not a shadow of a doubt, viz., that the British flag will shortly fly over the Presidencies at Bloemfontein and Pretoria, and that the South African Republic and Orange Free State will become as such but in memory and name.