to feed the burghers and make them
comfortable as they passed through Pretoria on the railway was Mrs. F.W.
Reitz, the wife of the Transvaal State Secretary, and never a
commando-train passed through the capital that she was not there to
distribute sandwiches, coffee, and milk.

When the first battles of the campaign had been fought and the wounded
were being brought from the front the women again volunteered to relieve
an embarrassed Government, and no nobler, more energetic efforts to
relieve suffering were ever made than those of the patriotic daughters of
the Transvaal and Orange Free State. Women from the farms assisted in the
hospitals; wives who directed the herding of cattle during the absence of
their husbands went to the towns and to the laager hospitals; young school
girls deserted their books and assisted in giving relief to the burghers
who were bullet-maimed or in the delirium of fever. No station in life was
unrepresented in the humanitarian work. Two daughters of the former
President of the Transvaal, the Rev. Thomas Francois Burgers, were nurses
in the Burke hospital in Pretoria, which was established and maintained by
a Boer burgher. Miss Martha Meyer, a daughter of General Lucas Meyer,
devoted herself assiduously to the relief of the wounded in the same
hospitals, and in the institution which Barney Barnato established in
Johannesburg there were scores of young women nurses who cared for British
and Boer wounded with unprejudiced attention. In every laager at the front
were young Boer vrouwen who, under the protection of the Red Cross, and
indifferent, to the creed, caste, or country of the wounded and dying,
assuaged the suffering of those who were entrusted to their care. In the
hospital-trains which carried the wounded from the battlefields to the
hospitals in Pretoria and Johannesburg were Boer women who considered
themselves particularly fortunate in having been able to secure posts
where they could be of service, while at the stations where the trains
halted were Boer women bearing baskets of fruit and bottles of milk for
the unfortunate burghers and soldiers in the carriages.

When the war began and all the large mines on the Witwatersrand and all
the big industries and stores in Johannesburg and Pretoria were obliged to
cease operations, much distress prevailed among the poorer classes of
foreigners who were left behind when the great exodus was concluded, and
after a few months their poverty