Papers Past | Newspapers | Star (Christchurch) | 28 September 1900 (2025)

KINSMEN OF THE BOERS

HOLLAND'S INTEREST IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR.. (By JULIAN RALPH in the "Daily Mail.") I . Amsterdam. "Coming to Holland from the field of war in South Africa, one naturally looks for reminders of tfc& Boei*s and -for points of comparison between, them and the Hollatideirs. • . . There are very few that ara apparent to the eye, though many force tfoeanselves-up-on the mind. ' : ' ' : Two hundred B,rid fifty years of isolation on the' veldt,- of mixture witih the blanks, and of steady avoidance of tbe refinements which make for progress,.. have< had upon the Boers the effect opposite to ithat which two centuries and a half epent on, a highway of tlie world's travel iuaive worked an the people of Holland. There i<t more similarity between * the polished and comfortable class of Hollanders and the. Knickerbockers of New York than there is between any class of Holland folk and any class of Boers. I saw Governor "Bjieodoi'e Roosevelt of Nsw York, clad as a priest in. th© stress of Amsterdam ; I saw Frederick Remington, the American artist, behind the of a bank ; and Mayor Van Wyck, of New York, was selling books in a shop in the Hague. THE ONLY BOER IN HOLLAND. But where do you suppose I saw th© /wily thoroughbred Boer I fan across in Holland? He was in\ Paul Potter's famous picture of the' Bull. Many readers of this are familiar wiifch thaib vigorous masterpiece. The young bull is beside a fence, on the other side of which stands his master, tbe farmer. He iis an unkempt, careless, rude, man, with an uncombed head, a rough untriinmed beand all around his face, and his shirt opsn b<rfore his brown, hairy chest. In. the pose of tike body, the loosa hanging of his arms, and the size of his feet and' hands, he is a type of the rude farmer of a bygone age or of ! an out-of-the-way region. His appearance startled me, and set a train of memory-pic-tures rolling panoramieally through my mind. Once again I saw the Boer dead ait Belmont.and at Moddsr ; again the long, swaying foef-weary Mne of Cronje's followers swept' by me, and anew t.hj& groups of -prisoners we . garnered from a . dozen fields lounged before ,me. t \, . '...-.': The farmer in the picture Was a Boer of to-day and a, Hollander of 1650— 0 f 1650, whem Paul Potter painted in Holland, and the Hollanders were settling the Cape of Good Hope. I saw no other Bceais, and few other re minders of them in Holland. ONE CHARACTERISTIC IN COMMON. Said a foreigner who had llysd many years 7 in Holland: "The. Dutch and the Boei\s retain at least the one governing characteristic which was strong in the ancieab Dutch. It is tenacity. They hold on to their land, they cling to' their love of independence, they never drop tiwir hatreds', quarrels or differences. Their religious prejudices are as strong as at the outset, and as bitterly championed. Another point of resemblance between the Dutch <\f Holland and the mixed race of the African Republics is their quarrelsomeness. If they cannot quarrel with outsiders they will quarrel among themselves. They aw irritable, petulant, quick-tempered and pugnacious. I have found that there is not in all the world a finer cultivation than that of tie leading men and women of Holland. There are no truer gemlemen or more lovely ladies. But the mass — the crowd — the mcb — is quarrelsome, meddling, coarse, -and difficult to get along with to a degree not descended to by any other peasantry in Europe." I quote this utterance at length, because I believe it to be just. lam paying ray third visit to Holland, and this verdict brings to mind a dozen proofs of its fairness. The buys and lads of Holland are notoriously the least disciplined and most disorderly ever known, and if the men of the masses begin life without control from within or without, there is no room for wonder at or dispute about the 'temperament of their parents or of themselves when they are grown. * Ars OBJECTIONABLE CUSTOM. ■ !The smart of a blow r bv a stone in the . back of my head as apparent as I write." I was stoned' in the main street <of Amsterdam on Sunday, while strolling in the crowd with a lady. A dczen painters have told ms ihat the behaviour of the boys in Holland has rendered out-of-dcor work almost impossible in Holland. After fifty or a hundred years of experimenting with different forms of annoyance, the'v appear to have agreed ;hat tha way to deal with an artist is either to stone him away at the start, and thus get i him off their minds, or to stand around his work with guileless faces and clenched hands until his picture is finished—then to simultaneously throw handsful of sand on the wet oil and ruin his painting beyond remedy. This ingenuity overreaches itself, however, i Painters are becoming very scarce, and the j Dutch lads "are forced to satisfy their instincts with s:toning the American and English ladies who traverse their roads on bicycles. As to the children of larger growth, I got a revelation a year ago which amazed me more than any human outbreak of the sort that I ever witnessed, even am.'oji<r theAlbanians, Chinese, the shepherds of the Caucasus, ihe moujiks of Russia, the Ameri- j can negroes, or the red Indians. The occasion was the night before a religious feast day, and all nisjht, until dawn, the. town gate poured foiih 'bacchanalian revellers, whose song's, yells, mad dancing, flinging <of women in the air, Shrieks and boisterous gallantry, literally woke the niglit-, caricatured ordina.rV inebriety and fouled as fair a countryside as exists on this planet. .. RESENTMENT- AGAINST ENGLAND. But these are recollections forced upon me by the text. Holland is so sweetly fair ti landv-^so clean of face, so thrifty, and: yrith so grand a history, that one ' wishes its Boers (so they call the peasants . there) were put of it. The Hollander is angry at England ; . but, like the Boer -of Africa, he conceals his feelings as well as he can, aiid today you see fewer insulting anti-British ' books, pictures,: a.nd illustrated postcards in Holland than in any European land except Italy. However,, unlike the African Dutch, they do not lie to conceal their feelings. They admit that they are heading, their mite upon the. nrountainof Anglopho-, bia, which threatens soon to make, they Britisher precisely what they champion the Boer for beiing — the . much-coinmdserated " uncler-dog." But the Hollander is the only European who can be acquitted 1 of blame for partisanship against Enfland over the [Transvaal war. He naturally reseats the

spilling of Dutch blood on the veldt — without realising how stained and impure it is. Whether iihe mass of Holland people know that the Boers failed to pay even the interest on the Fatherland's sympathy, I am not aware ; "but it was my observation' in South Africa-, that the Transvaaler* and Free Starters detested the Hollanders more than they did any other friendly meddlers on their behalf. All the Boers I met told' me that their people disliked all the foreigners in'tfheir armie3 and their cities, 'but they most particularly detested the Hollander.?. They explained that thi9 was 'because the Hollanders were "becoming too influential with their Governments, and l because the mass of them only came to the Transvaaland Free State to make moiney on it'lie rail^ ' way, in the post office, and .in other Government Departments.' The unhappy Boer* did not realise that since they showed neither the ability nor the inclination. to mam llhe progressive adjuncts of their Governments, it must fall to foreigners to do this work. UNREQUITED SIAORIFIOE3. It was hatred of England which impelled so many Swedes and Germans and Irish to join the Boer forces. If that feeling is not still sufficiently strong to silence them, we shall 'hear, when 1 the war is over, how contemptuously and insultingly the Boers behaved towards their foreign'comrades. I <was told in Bloemfo'ntein that Colouel Villebois never met with respect or kindness from t ! ho Beers in the .field. He had to wait until his body fell into the hands of the British and was interred 1 with military honours under a tribute of carved stone. 'Many another adventurer missed j even thait posthumous good fortune. One day recently a Jarge mrailber of Holland folk were landed at Flushing on their return from)*. South Africa. I in-, quired concerning them, fancying thnt they might have been fighting for the Boers. I learned tihat, pni the contrary, nearly wll were the men (and the families of the mem) who had been employed! on the Transvaal and Free State railways. The Hollanders who were established in South Africa when the Boers declared war were mainly railway men and teachers, and perhaps a few preachers. Thoss who were there to take part in the war formed no corps oif fighters, bub only a smsill hospital force. This they tell me in {Holland. Scarcely any Hollanders fought Ifor their distant kinsmen, except- the few who had become farmers and burghers, and were obliged to do their duty »by their new country. Perhaps, then, t(he Boer de-. serves to have his poor opinioni elf the Hollander regarded with some charity.

Using This Item

No known copyright (New Zealand)

To the best of the National Library of New Zealand’s knowledge, under New Zealand law, there is no copyright in this item in New Zealand.

You can copy this item, share it, and post it on a blog or website. It can be modified, remixed and built upon. It can be used commercially. If reproducing this item, it is helpful to include the source.

For further information please refer to the Copyright guide.