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Gunner W. H. Blackburn, 28th Battery Royal Field Artillery, being duly sworn, states: 'I saw a Boer take a rifle and bandolier from a wounded Derby man, and then shoot him; the Boer then came to me and asked me for my rifle; I showed it him where it was lying on the ground. Things of this sort are progressive. Here is what occurred at Brakenlaagte when the rear of Benson's column was destroyed.
The weather had been very bad, and it was in a deluge of cold driving rain that the British set forth upon October 30th, moving towards Brakenlaagte, which is a point about forty miles due south of Middelburg. It was Benson's intention to return to his base. About midday the column, still escorted by large bodies of aggressive Boers, came to a difficult spruit swollen by the rain.
They had taken away the guns during the night, and were already beyond the reach of pursuit. Such was the action at Brakenlaagte, which cost the British sixty men killed and 170 wounded, together with two guns.
Surrounded at Scheepers Nek by many hundreds of riflemen in a difficult country, there was no alternative but a surrender, and so sharp and sudden was the Boer advance that the whole action was over in a very short time. The new tactics of the Boers, already used at Vlakfontein, and afterwards to be successful at Brakenlaagte and at Tweebosch, were put in force.
Dartnell had retraced his steps nearly as far as Eland's River Bridge, when the Boer leader sprang out of his lair in the Langberg and threw himself upon him. The burghers attempted to ride in, as they had successfully done at Brakenlaagte, but they were opposed by the steady old troopers of the two regiments of Imperial Horse, and by a General who was familiar with every Boer ruse.
In order to make a consecutive and intelligible narrative, I will continue with an account of the operations in this south-eastern portion of the Transvaal from the action of Brakenlaagte down to the end of the year 1901.
Had Methuen's rearguard consisted of Imperial Light Horse, or Scottish Horse, it is safe to say that the battle of Tweebosch would have had a very different ending. What happened was that a large body of Boers formed up in five lines and charged straight home at the rear screen and rearguard, firing from their saddles as they had done at Brakenlaagte.
But the day is rapidly approaching when we must turn to the world with our evidence and say, 'Are these the deeds of soldiers or of brigands? If they act as brigands, then, why must we for ever treat them as soldiers? I have read letters from soldiers who saw their own comrades ill-treated at Brakenlaagte.
Major N. E. Young, D.S.O., Royal Field Artillery, sends the report to the Commander-in-Chief of Boer cruelty to the officers and men wounded in the action with Colonel Benson's column at Brakenlaagte. It is dated Pretoria, November 7, and Lord Kitchener's covering letter is dated November 9.
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