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Lord Roberts's operations, prepared with admirable secrecy and carried out with extreme energy, aimed at two different results, each of which he was fortunate enough to attain. The first was that an overpowering force of cavalry should ride round the Boer position and raise the siege of Kimberley: the fate of this expedition has already been described.
He might move the stern man by a recapitulation of the sorrow of his circumstances, or he might burst out into passionate wrath, and lay all his ruin to his partner's doing. He might still hope that in this latter way he could rouse all Kimberley against Gordon, and thus creep back into some vestige of property under the shadow of Gordon's iniquities. He would try both.
This movement of French's appeared to imply that Cronje's army was known to be retreating to the west or north-west, and that French took the road through Kimberley as the shortest way to reach a position where that retreat could be intercepted.
"The mail's just in." "Mail from Capetown?" "Yes." Ezra quickened his pace and strode down Stockdale Street into the Main Street, which, as the name implies, is the chief thoroughfare of Kimberley. He came out close to the office of the Vaal River Advertiser and Diamond Field Gazette. There was a crowd in front of the door.
Proceeding to the front at the beginning of February, within a fortnight he had relieved Kimberley, within a month he had destroyed Cronje's force, and within six weeks he was in Bloemfontein. Then, after a six weeks' halt which could not possibly have been shortened, he made another of his tiger leaps, and within a month had occupied Johannesburg and Pretoria.
There he sent a most innocent wire to a small retail tobacconist in Kimberley a wire that apparently conveyed nothing more than a complaint as to the quality of certain cigars that Solly had received.
No king or tyrant of old, indeed, treated his subjects with the severity which Rhodes showed in regard to the different civil officials and military defenders of the Rhodesia he loved so much and so unwisely. It is curious that Rhodes never allowed speculation a free hand in Rhodesia as he had done at Kimberley or at Johannesburg.
But Colonial politicians as a whole were "not gentlemen with whom it was agreeable to be forced into contact." To give the Colony responsible government has been "an act of deliberate insanity" on the part of Lord Kimberley and the Liberal Cabinet.
Rhodes," the heliograph ran, "that on my entry into Kimberley he and his friends must take their immediate departure."
There was also a line from Boshof, across the Cape Colony frontier, to Kimberley. Last, but not least, came the "White Elephant" with which the reader is already acquainted the line from Bloemfontein to Ladybrand, through Thaba'Nchu. All these lines were in the Free State.
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