De Wet and the End of the War.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 7, 12 February 1903, Page 2

De Wet and the End of the War.

Everyone now is reading De Wet's great work on the late war —a work so thrillingly interesting that when once one has dipped into it it is almost impossible to lay it aside till the last page is turned. His account of the general course of the struggle, the story of his own achievements and hairbreadth escapes, his views of the block-house system and of the various British generals, will all be read with eagerness and will well repay the reading ; but the chief interest after all will centre round two great questions, To what precisely do the Boers attribute the failure of their enterprise, and what was the main motive which influenced them at the Vereeniging Conference in deciding to lay down their arms. To both of these questions De Wet's book gives a clear reply. As to the first, De Wet is emphatically of opinion that the Boers, in spite of the heavy odds against them, would have been victorious in the struggle had it not been for treachery in their own ranks. ' Had not so many of our burghers, he says, ' proved false to their colors, England —as the great Bismarck foretold —would have found her grave in South Africa.' And throughout the work he gives numerous instances of the way in which these ' unfaithful burghers,' as he mildly calls them, gave assistance to the British and did all in their power to nullify the plans and efforts of the fighting Boers. Of course the Boer feeling towards these men was very bitter, and even for the colonists of the Cape —though these were neither Free Staters nor Transvaalers —who joined the British forces the Boers had nothing but a feeling of the most utter contempt. Speaking of the Cape Mounted Rifles and Brabant's Horse, both of which bodies belonged to this latter class, De Wet says : ' They were Africanders, ar.d as Africanders, they ought in our opinion to be ashamed to fight against us. The English, we admitted, had a perfect right to hire such sweepings, and to use them against us, but we utterly despised them for allowing themselves to be hired. We felt that their motive was not to obtain the franchise of the Uitlanders, but —five shillings a day ! And if it should by any chance happen that anyone of them should find his grave there —well, the generation to come would not be very proud of that grave. No, it would be regarded with horror as the grave of an Africander who had helped to bring his brother Africanders to their downfall. Although I never took it amiss if a colonist of Natal or of Cape Colony was unwilling to fight with us against England yet I admit that it vexed me greatly to think that some ol these colonists, for the sake of a paltry five shillings a day,

should be ready to shoot down their fellow-countrymen. Such men, alas, there have always been, since, in the first days of the human race, Cain killed his brother Abel. But,' he adds suggestively,' Cain had not long to wait for his reward.' • As to the reason which finally induced the Boers to abandon the struggle, it was, according to Ue Wet's showing, not weariness of the war nor lack of patriotic spirit, nor even discouragement at the apparent failure of their efforts, but rather the plight of the women and the dread prospect of the complete extermination of their race if the women were allowed to die at the rate they were doing in the concentration camps, that eventually turned the scale. In the course of the Conference, De Wet himself spoke strongly in favor of continuing the war, but the one problem which baffled him and baffled every member of the gathering was: How were their women and children to be saved? As De Wet expresses it in his book, 'What were we to do? To continue the struggle meant extermination. Already our women and children were dying by the thousand, and^ starvation was knocking at the door —and knocking loudly !' It was accordingly decided to agree to the terms on which Britain was prepared to conclude peace. No one could help being touched at the General's pathetic description of the feeling with which the brave burghers said farewell to their long-cherished hope of independence. ' I will not attempt,' he says, ' to describe the struggle it cost us to accept these proposals. Suffice it to say that when it was over, it had left its mark on every face On the sth June the first commando laid down their weapons near Vredefort. To every man there, as to myself, this surrender was no more and no less than the sacrifice of our independence. I have often been present at the death-bed and at the burial of those who have been nearest to my heart—father, mother, brother, and friend —but the grief which I felt on those occasions was not to be compared with what I now underwent at the burial of my Nation ! . . . . ' The whole miserable business (he continues) came to an end on the 16th of June, when the burghers who had fought under Generals Niemvomodt and Brand laid down their arms —the Nation had submitted to its fate ! There was nothing left for us now but to hope that the Power which had conquered us, the Power to which we were compelled to submit, though it cut us to the heart to do so, and which, by the surrender of our arms, we had accepted as our Ruler, would draw us nearer and ever nearer by the strong cords of love.' A hope which every friend of humanity and lover of freedom will cordially endorse.