The Shadow of the Past by Ethel Mills

The dark cloud which had so long overshadowed South Africa, which stretched now blacker than it had ever appeared across the sky of the Union's prosperity, was none the less surely passing, rolling backward with sullen reluctance before the strong opposing breath of leading opinion.

This German organised rebellion owed its defeat largely to the fact that the Dutch in the Colony knew by experience how little reliance was to be placed in German promises. The Boer is beginning to recognise that the word of a German is binding only in as far as it serves his own end. The memories of men who fought in the late Boer war are not all as conveniently short as their German advisers hoped. Brand, in his historical letter to de Wet, emphasised this point in his reply to de Wet's earnest exhortation to him to depart from the policy he had adopted and join the rebellion, which he insisted arose out of a spirit of deep indignation at the unholy act of the Government in attacking German South-West Africa.