appeared armed and bandoliered Boers, prepared to join their countrymen in
the field, with wounded friends and sad-faced women to bid farewell to
them. While the train lay waiting at the station small commandos of
burghers came dashing through the dusty streets, bustled their horses into
trucks at the rear end of the passenger train, and in a few moments they
were mingling with the foreign volunteers in the coaches. Grey-haired
Boers gravely bade adieu to their wives and children, lovers embraced
their weeping sweethearts, and the train moved on toward Pretoria and the
battlefields where these men were to risk their lives for the life of
their country.

Historic ground, where Briton and Boer had fought before, came in view.
Bronkhorst Spruit, where a British commander led more than one hundred of
his men to death in 1880, lay to the left of the road in a little wooded
ravine. Farther on toward Pretoria appeared rocky kopjes, where afterwards
the Boers, retreating from the capital city, gathered their disheartened
forces, and resisted the advance of the enemy. Eerste Fabriken was a
hamlet hardly large enough to make an impression upon the memory, but it
marked a battlefield where the burghers fought desperately. Children were
then gathering peaches from the trees, whose roots drank the blood of
heroes months afterwards. Several miles farther on were the hills on the
outskirts of Pretoria, where, in the war of 1881, the Boer laagers sent
forth men to encompass the city and to prevent the British besieged in it
from escaping. It was ground hallowed in Boer history since the early
voortrekkers crossed the ridges of the Magaliesberg and sought protection
from the savage hordes of Moselekatse in the fertile valley of the Aapjes
River.

Pretoria in war-time was most peaceful. In the days before the
commencement of hostilities it was a city of peace as contrasted with the