Marks was
more than sixty-two years old, and was somewhat decrepit, a circumstance
which did not prevent him from taking part in almost every one of the
Natal battles, however. The old farmer had been absent from his laager
less than an hour when he saw a small body of British soldiers at the foot
of a kopje. He crept cautiously around the kopje, and, when he was within
a hundred yards of the men, he shouted, "Hands up!" The soldiers
immediately lifted their arms, and, in obedience to the orders of Marks,
stacked their guns on a rock and advanced toward him. Marks placed the men
in a line, saw that there were twenty-three big, able-bodied soldiers, and
then marched them back into camp, to the great astonishment of his
generals and fellow burghers.
[Illustration: PLAN OF BATTLEFIELD OF SANNASPOST]
CHAPTER VI
THE BOERS IN BATTLE
The battle of Sannaspost on March 31st was one of the few engagements in
the campaign in which the forces of the Boers and the British were almost
numerically equal. There were two or three small battles in which the
Boers had more men engaged than the British, but in the majority of
instances the Boers were vastly outnumbered both in men and guns. At
Elandslaagte the Boers had exactly seven hundred and fifty burghers pitted
against the five or six thousand British; Spion Kop was won from three
thousand British by three hundred and fifty Boers; at the Tugela Botha
with not more than twenty-six hundred men fought for more than a week
against ten times that number of soldiers under General Buller; while the
greatest disparity between the opposing forces was at Paardeberg, where
Cronje spent a week in trying to lead his four thousand men through the
encircling wall of forty or fifty thousand British soldiers.
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