ielded the carbines as assiduously as the most
energetic men.

[Illustration: MRS. OTTO KRANTZ, A BOER AMAZON]

One of the women who received the Government's sanction to join a commando
was Mrs. Otto Krantz, the wife of a professional hunter. Mrs. Krantz
accompanied her husband to Natal at the commencement of hostilities, and
remained in the field during almost the entire campaign in that colony. In
the battle of Elandslaagte, where some of the hardest hand-to-hand
fighting of the war occurred, this Amazon was by the side of her husband
in the thick of the engagement, but escaped unscathed. Later she took part
in the battles along the Tugela, and when affairs in the Free State
appeared to be threatening she was one of the first to go to the scene of
action in that part of the country.

Among the prisoners captured by the British forces at Colesburg were three
Boer women who wore men's clothing, but it was not until after they had
been confined in the prison-ship at Cape Town for several weeks that their
sex was discovered. A real little Boertje was Helena Herbst Wagner, of
Zeerust, who spent five months in the laagers and in the trenches without
her identity being revealed. Her husband went to the field early in the
war and left her alone with a baby. The infant died in January and the
disconsolate woman donned her husband's clothing, obtained a rifle and
bandolier, and went to the Natal front to search for her soldier-spouse.
Failing to find him, she joined the forces of Commandant Ben Viljoen and
faced bullets, bombs, and lyddite at Spion Kop, Pont Drift, and Pieter's
Hills. During the retreat to Van Tonder's Nek the young woman learned that
her husband lay seriously wounded in the Johannesburg hospital, and she
deserted the army temporarily to nurse him.

When Louis Botha became Commandant-General of the army he issued an order
that women would not be permitted to visit the laagers, and few, if any,
took part in the engagements for some time thereafter. When the forces of
the enemy approached Pretoria the women made heroic efforts to encourage
the burghers, and frequently went to the laagers to cheer them to renewed
resistance. Mrs. General Botha and Mrs. General Meyer were specially
energetic and effective in their efforts to instil new courage in the men,
and during the war there was no scene which was more edifying than that of
those two patriotic Boer women riding about the laagers and beseeching the
burghers