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If the undertaking were successful, superior British numbers would be planted across the line of Cronje's communications with Bloemfontein, and the cavalry on his rear to intercept retreat in mass to the north. To this turning operation were assigned three divisions of infantry and one of cavalry; the latter was under General French, called from the Naauwport district for this purpose.
There was the small army of Sir George White in Natal, something more than fifteen thousand men, and there were the detached parties holding points on the colonial railway system, Naauwport, De Aar, Orange River, Kimberley and Mafeking. These detachments, however, are largely made up of local levies, and the total number of British troops among them can hardly amount to three thousand.
Soon out on the broad, brown veldt, far-distant hills showing finely cut in the exquisitely clear air. Such an atmosphere I have never seen for purity. The sun was rising into a cloudless sky from behind a kopje. The flat-topped kopje is now the regular feature. Water, feed, and breakfast at a tiny roadside place, with the inevitable couple of tents and khaki men. This was Naauwport.
Reaching Cape Town immediately after the investment of Ladysmith, French was sent up country by Sir Redvers Buller with orders to seize Naauwport, then recently evacuated, and whenever possible to push on and gain Colesberg. Naauwport was reoccupied November 19, and thenceforth activity was incessant.
Naauwport had also been quitted at about the same time, but the Boer grasp in that central quarter was never as firm as it was to the eastward and westward.
Naauwport was reoccupied by the British November 19, and De Aar was never by them abandoned; but the Boers on the 25th of November blew up a bridge on the line from Naauwport via Middelburg and Rosmead to Port Elizabeth, thereby momentarily cutting out the line from this sea base also, as their advance upon Stormberg had eliminated East London.
Mafeking is from Kimberley 223 miles; Kimberley from De Aar, 146; De Aar from Naauwport, 69; Naauwport from Stormberg 80, as the crow flies over a difficult country, at least 130 by rail.
The result throughout was if not paralysis at least a cessation of movement, after the reverses above mentioned, except in the brilliant and useful, but in scale minor, operations of General French upon their left centre, about Naauwport and Colesberg.
Clements continued to cover Naauwport, the important railway junction, until the advance of Roberts's army caused a complete reversal of the whole military situation.
On March 15, two days after the occupation of Bloemfontein, Clements, whose temporary retirement has been noted, reached and held Norval's Pont, where the line from Naauwport to Bloemfontein crossed the Orange; while Gatacre, so long at a standstill, the same day occupied Bethulie, where the road from East London bridges the river.
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