The battle of Pretoria: Boers awaiting the British advance under artillery fire 229
The battle of Pretoria: British naval guns shelling forts 229
General De la Rey and staff at Pretoria; his nephew, twelve years old, is serving on the staff 232
Field cornets in Pretoria receiving orders from a general 233
Boer women bidding good-by to their men off for the front 235
Russian hospital corps with the Boers: the wounded man is Colonel Blake, formerly U. S. A. 235
Boers under heavy shell fire, awaiting British advance behind their defenses 243
Burghers’ horses during the battle of Pretoria 243
General De la Rey and a group of his burghers while awaiting a British attack 249
Lord Roberts’s advance bodyguard approaching Pretoria 251
Lord Roberts and staff approaching Pretoria (Lord Kitchener is on the white horse, Lord Roberts is the first leading figure at the right) 253
Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener with staff entering Pretoria at the railway station, June 5, 1900. The two locomotives on the right, with Boer engineers, were started immediately afterwards in an attempt to escape to the Boer lines 255
Gordon Highlanders entering Pretoria, June 5, 1900 259
Types of the crowd who watched the British entry 259
Lord Kitchener bidding good-by to the foreign _attachés_ after the capture of Pretoria 265
When the Second Division under General Lawton swarmed up the fire-swept hill of El Caney, through an unremitting storm of bullets, Colonel Arthur Lee, of the British Royal Artillery, exclaimed, “I would not have believed it!”
Two years later, when Lord Roberts’s army of ragged khaki poured into Pretoria after their two thousand miles’ march from the Cape, Captain Slocum, of the United States Infantry, said, “Tommy Atkins is certainly a wonder.”
There is obvious reason for a detailed comparison between the fighting men of the United States and Great Britain. They have more in common than either army has with the soldiers of any other nation. They have both during the last three years fought testing wars against other civilized nations, in which they faced for the first time the new conditions of modern warfare. The relative qualifications of the two armies have a pressing bearing on the troublous questions of alliance or disputes yet to be between them. When the soldiers of these two nations meet now, each has a sense of their peculiar relation of mutuality, which is made piquant by the uncertainty whether they will continue to support one another, as in China, or whether there is an evil day in store when they shall have to cut one another’s throats. But whatever the uncertainty, and whatever the surface criticisms which each passes upon the other, there is at bottom both respect and fraternity on the part of each.