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Show BOER WOMEN FIGHTERS. The women of the Transvaal seem to be fighting side by side with their husbands hus-bands and sons. It shows how intensely earnest all are in the defense of their homes against the invasion of the foreign for-eign robber. While it is distressing to read of j Boer women shot to death in the j trenches, yet it bespeaks an unmeas- j ured loyalty to a cause which is eminently emi-nently just. Probably there never was a time in the history of the world when women exhibited such conspicuous conspicu-ous devotion to home and country. The dispatches tell us that after j Cronje's surrender the dead bodies of women were found in the trenches. The women seem to be only too anx-ius anx-ius to shed their blood with the men in defending Transvaal territory. The Boer woman is a strange figure, apart from this age, uncouth, heroic, possessing boundless courage and the bigotry of her husband in an exaggerated exag-gerated degreee. "With the 3,000 Boers who resisted for a week the assault of 50,000 British troops in that death hole in the Mod-der Mod-der River were the wives, sweethearts, children and other women relatives of the defenders. They had accompanied the original army of 10,000 Boers which resisted Methuen's- advance and slaughtered the Highland brigade at Magersfontein. It was not that the Boers took their wives. The women insisted on going. They said it was their right. The freedom free-dom of their country was as much to them as to the men. As the mothers went, they had to take their children, for there would have been no one left to look after them at home. They would have been left to the mercy of the Kaffirs. To set the example, Mrs. Cronje, wife of the ablest general of the Boers, accompanied ac-companied her husband. He is a rich man, probably a millionaire, but in the Transvaal the rich are as ready as the poor to give their lives in defense of their country. It may be added that there are no poor, in the European sense, in that country. What a spectacle was that the wife of the great and rich man of the Transvaal doing her duty under the murderous fire of 50,000 soldiers! That simple old Boer housewife made coffee, cof-fee, cooked food, nursed the wounded, carried ammunition, while a hail of rifle bullets and lyddite shells charged with poisonous vapor filled the bend of the Modder River with death and disease. dis-ease. Dying men and animals lay all around, but she calmly went on with her work, her own safety being the last things she thought about. There is no more heroic spectacle than this in all history. |