are necessary to the well-being and comfort of every army, however
simple its organisation.

Among the Boers were many burghers who had assisted Great Britain in her
former wars in South Africa--men who had fought under the British flag,
but were now fighting against it. Colonel Ignace Ferreira, a member of one
of the oldest Boer families, fought under Lord Wolseley in the Zulu war,
and had the Order of the Commander of the Bath conferred upon him by the
Queen. Colonel Ferreira was at the head of a commando at Mafeking. Paul
Dietzch, the military secretary of General Meyer, fought under the British
flag in the Gaika and several other native wars.

It was not only the extremely old and the extremely young who went to war;
it was a transfer of the entire population of the two Republics to the
frontiers, and no condition or position was sufficient excuse to remain
behind. The professional man of Pretoria and Johannesburg was in a laager
which was adjacent to a laager of farthest-back veld-farmers. Lawyers and
physicians, photographers and grocers, speculators and sextons, judges and
schoolmasters, schoolboys and barkeepers--all who were burghers locked
their desks and offices and journeyed to the front. Even clergymen closed
their houses of worship in the towns and remained among the commandos to
pray and preach for those who did the fighting. The members of the
Volksraads, who brought on the war by their ultimatum, were among the
first in the field, and foremost in attacking the soldiers of their enemy.
Students in European universities, who hastened home when war-clouds were
gathering, went shoulder to shoulder into battle with the backwoodsman,
the Boer takhaar. There was no pride among them; no class distinction
which prevented a farmer from speaking to a millionaire. A graduate of
Cambridge had as his boon companion for five months a farmer who thought
the earth a square, and imagined the United States to be a political