"No. Very many of us consider the conqueror of the Soudan to be one who, if
he lives, will make as great a mark in history as Wellington."

At this a joyous smile would illuminate the face of the Boer. He would
reply, "Yes, yes; Roberts is a great man, a very great man indeed. So is
Kitchener, so is General French, so is General Macdonald, so is General
Methuen. Yet all those five men are attempting to get Cronje into a corner
where they can capture him. They have ten times as many soldiers as Cronje
has, ten times as many guns; therefore, what a really great man Cronje must
be on your own showing."

That was before the fatal 27th of February on which Cronje surrendered.

I often asked them how they, representing a couple of small States, came to
get hold of the idea that they could whip a colossal Power like Great
Britain in a life or death struggle; and almost invariably they informed me
that they had expected that one of the great European Powers would take an
active part in the struggle on their behalf, and, furthermore, they had
been taught to think that Britain's Empire was rotten to the core, so much
so that as soon as war commenced in earnest all her colonies would fall
away from her and hoist the flag of independence, and that India would leap
once again into open and bloody mutiny. They expressed themselves as being
dumbfounded when they heard that Australian troops were rallying under the
Union Jack, and seemed to feel most bitterly that the men from the land of
the Southern Cross were in arms against them. "We fell out with England,
and we thought we had to fight England. Instead we find we have to fight
people from all parts of the world, Colonials like ourselves. Surely
Australia and Canada might have kept out of this fight, and allowed us to
battle it out with the country we had a quarrel with."