Word: veld
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...week's end, Prime Minister Smuts was taking long walks on the veld around his farm near Pretoria. For him the question was whether to veto Natal's ordinance by an Act of Parliament and rock his Government, or let the ordinance stand and perhaps rock the Empire...
...white hair and beard have thinned; the furrows of nigh 74 years line the veld-weathered face that Frans Hals might have painted. But the pale blue eyes are tirelessly alert. The thinning figure, rather gaunt now, slippered and with a trace of a stoop, moves briskly...
...that his Boer War days were his happiest. He came out of them 30 pounds heavier, transformed from a bookish lawyer into a hardened leader of men. On their tough Basuto ponies, he and his tough commando (guerrilla) column made a record march (700 miles in five weeks) across veld and mountain. They repeatedly outwitted Lord Kitchener's proud British Army, which Winston Churchill was covering as a young correspondent. When the rains came, they rode in water, slept in water; they endured cold, hunger, rags, sudden surprise, desperate flight. Through it all, yellow-bearded, slouch-hatted Commandant-General...
...wayside stations they smashed windows of other trains, broke open fruit trucks, shattered hotel windows, damaged shop fronts, plastered white civilians with whatever their hooch-hot hands could find to throw. Near the Touws River junction, where locomotives are changed, the switch had to be made in the open veld: the crew was afraid to take the train into the station. As a train from the Orange Free State passed by, the mulattoes smashed long rows of its carriage windows with bottles and fruit...
...Bible and a bandoleer into the Boer War, bravely and cleverly fought the British-as did Smuts. But the Hertzog enmity continued. He voted against the peace at Vereeniging in 1902, devoted the succeeding years to law and his own brand of reform. In the mining camps, the veld farmhouses and the dorps (country towns), he harangued against horse racing, gambling, nightclubs, novels and the British. He advocated no votes, no beer, no property for Negroes. In the army he introduced horsewhipping and quick execution for spies and traitors. At home he was a stern father to his three sons...