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"I thought I heard something. Did someone open the door? It's getting very dark." Yes; the door had opened, but only the dying brain had caught the sound. As Carey came noiselessly forward only the dying man greeted him. "Ah, here you are! Come quite close to me! I want to see you, if I can. You're the little newspaper chap who saved my life at Magersfontein?" "Yes," Carey said.
His Head-Quarters were at Brown's Drift on the Modder, six miles from the key of the position on Magersfontein. The sound of the bombardment notified him that an infantry attack was imminent, and he hurried off to make the final arrangements for meeting it. These he seems to have completed to his satisfaction, and he rested for an hour or two, rising soon after midnight.
The days of inaction were over. Cronje and his forces were saying a hasty good-bye to the hills at Magersfontein, which had so long defied Lord Methuen and his troops, and were flying for their lives. On Thursday, February 15, huge clouds of dust appeared upon the horizon, and the tidings spread throughout the town that the relief column was in sight.
When the last and chief of these, Klip Drift on the Modder, some twenty miles east of Magersfontein, was held by an infantry division, the cavalry's flank would be secured and its advance would then be pressed to Kimberley. While the movement was in progress, Methuen in his old lines on the Modder would hold the enemy in his positions by a demonstration of force seemingly not reduced.
At Magersfontein he played his hand with skill, but lost the deciding game at Paardeberg. Baden-Powell was too zealous a soldier to conform to the schism that the operations of war were akin to athletics or sport. Externally his predilections were for the drama. He was a competent actor and manager, and he rejoiced in Mafeking as in a stage play.
When the young Irish-American reached him the officer was bleeding profusely, and started to say: "You were a better man than I," but he died in Donnelly's arms before he could utter the last two words of the sentence. At Magersfontein Donnelly was in a perilous position between the two forces, and realised that he could not escape being captured by the British.
That position was, however, for the reason just stated, insecure; and on the December 4 the Magersfontein position was taken up and prepared for defence by Delarey. A low arc stretching from the position towards the Modder was discovered, from which a flanking fire could be poured in upon a frontal attack.
Dark Cronje, betrayer of Potchefstroom, iron-handed ruler of natives, reviler of the British, stern victor of Magersfontein, at last there has come a day of reckoning for you! On Wednesday, the 21st, the British, being now sure of their grip of Cronje, turned upon the Boer force which had occupied the hill to the south-east of the drift.
Methuen's expectations that as at Modder River after the fight of November 28 so also at Magersfontein the Boers would evacuate their positions during the night were not realized.
On January 8, Buller, whose Head Quarters were at Frere, was reinforced by the Vth Division under Warren, and he now resumed his original plan, out of which he had been scared by Magersfontein, of advancing on Ladysmith by way of Potgieter's Drift, rejecting an alternative plan proposed by Warren, which differed little from that by which the relief of Ladysmith was effected six weeks later, of a direct advance by way of Hlangwhane and Pieter's Hill.
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