By This Action One Of The Most Daring
And Resourceful Of The Dutch Leaders Fell Into The Hands Of The
British.
It is a pity that his record is stained by his
dishonourable conduct in breaking the compact made on the occasion
of the capture of Prinsloo.
But for British magnanimity a drumhead
court-martial should have taken the place of the hospitality of the
Ceylon planters.
On September 2nd another commando of Free State Boers under Fourie
emerged from the mountain country on the Basuto border, and fell
upon Ladybrand, which was held by a feeble garrison consisting of
one company of the Worcester regiment and forty-three men of the
Wiltshire Yeomanry. The Boers, who had several guns with them,
appear to have been the same force which had been repulsed at
Winburg. Major White, a gallant marine, whose fighting qualities do
not seem to have deteriorated with his distance from salt water,
had arranged his defences upon a hill, after the Wepener model, and
held his own most stoutly. So great was the disparity of the forces
that for days acute anxiety was felt lest another of those
humiliating surrenders should interrupt the record of victories,
and encourage the Boers to further resistance. The point was
distant, and it was some time before relief could reach them. But
the dusky chiefs, who from their native mountains looked down on
the military drama which was played so close to their frontier,
were again, as on the Jammersberg, to see the Boer attack beaten
back by the constancy of the British defence. The thin line of
soldiers, 150 of them covering a mile and a half of ground, endured
a heavy shell and rifle fire with unshaken resolution, repulsed
every attempt of the burghers, and held the flag flying until
relieved by the forces under White and Bruce Hamilton. In this
march to the relief Hamilton's infantry covered eighty miles in
four and a half days. Lean and hard, inured to warfare, and far
from every temptation of wine or women, the British troops at this
stage of the campaign were in such training, and marched so
splendidly, that the infantry was often very little slower than the
cavalry. Methuen's fine performance in pursuit of De Wet, where
Douglas's infantry did sixty-six miles in seventy-five hours, the
City Imperial Volunteers covering 224 miles in fourteen days, with
a single forced march of thirty miles in seventeen hours, the
Shropshires forty-three miles in thirty-two hours, the forty-five
miles in twenty-five hours of the Essex Regiment, Bruce Hamilton's
march recorded above, and many other fine efforts serve to show the
spirit and endurance of the troops.
In spite of the defeat at Winburg and the repulse at Ladybrand,
there still remained a fair number of broken and desperate men in
the Free State who held out among the difficult country of the
east. A party of these came across in the middle of September and
endeavoured to cut the railway near Brandfort.
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