father knelt and pressed the hand of him whose feet were on the very
threshold of the land beyond the shadows. I saw others smiling up into the
faces of women--the poor, pain-drawn faces of the dying looking less
haggard and worn than the anguish-stricken features of their womanhood who
knelt to comfort them in that last awful hour--in the hour which divides
time from eternity, the sunlight of lusty life from the shadows of
unsearchable death. Those things I have seen, and in the ears of English
men and English women, let me say, as one who knows, and fain would speak
the plain, ungilded truth concerning friend and foe, that, not alone
beneath the British flag are heroes found. Not alone at the breasts of
British matrons are brave men suckled; for, as my soul liveth--whether
their cause be just or unjust, whether the right or the wrong of this war
be with them, whether the blood of the hundreds who have fallen since the
first rifle spoke defiance shall speak for or against them at the day of
judgment--they at least know how to die; and when a man has given his life
for the cause he believes in he is proven worthy even of his worst enemy's
respect. And it seems to me that the British nation, with its long roll of
heroic deeds, wrought the whole world over, from Africa to Iceland, can
well afford to honour the splendid bravery and self-sacrifice of these
rude, untutored tillers of the soil. I have seen them die.

Once, as I lay a prisoner in a rocky ravine all through the hot afternoon,
I heard the rifles snapping like hounds around a cornered beast. I watched
the Boers as they moved from cover to cover, one here, one there, a little
farther on a couple in a place of vantage, again, in a natural fortress, a
group of eight; so they were placed as far as my eye could reach. The
British force I could not see at all; they were out on the veldt, and the
kopjes hid them from me; but I could hear the regular roll and ripple of
their disciplined volleys, and in course of time, by watching the actions
of the Boers, I could anticipate the sound. They watched our officers, and