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Her presentiment that all would again go on in the old way had not deceived her. "On Tuesday I shall be in Petersburg, and everything can be settled." "Yes," she said. "But don't let us talk any more of it." Anna's carriage, which she had sent away, and ordered to come back to the little gate of the Vrede garden, drove up. Anna said good-bye to Vronsky, and drove home.
Here, however, I divided the commandos. General Froneman, with the Vrede and Heilbron burghers, I sent back to cross the railway lines between the Doorn and Zand Rivers, with orders to operate in the northern districts of the State.
Would you seal it up, please, and send it off?" she said from the door; "I have to give some directions." Without a moment's thought, Anna sat down to the table with Betsy's letter, and, without reading it, wrote below: "It's essential for me to see you. Come to the Vrede garden. I shall be there at six o'clock."
By January the 25th nearly the whole of my commandos had assembled; only General Philip Botha, with the burghers from Vrede under Commandant Hermanus Botha, had yet to arrive in order to complete our numbers; and he had been prevented coming. President Steyn and the Government decided to go with me and my two thousand burghers.
'The gate of the house from which we had provisioned ourselves was adorned with the legend, Vreugde bij Vrede, "Joy with Peace," and it bore every mark of the busy retirement of a comfort-loving proprietor.
I allowed those from Bethlehem to leave me in order to carry on operations in their part of the country; the same likewise with the Winburgers and the valiant Commandant Hasebroek, while the burghers of Vrede and Harrismith had gone home. I had therefore with me only a small contingent from those districts, in addition to the burghers from Heilbron.
Buller's operations in the Free State lasted two days only. On June 10 he engaged a small body of the retreating enemy and entered the Transvaal. In front of him was the Versamelberg, a spur of the Drakensberg, over which the road from Vrede to Volksrust passes at Alleman's Nek, where 2,000 Boers with four guns had taken up a very strong position.
They accomplished this speedily, and then proceeded to the construction of other similar lines, not being contented until they had "pegged out" the country as follows: On the Natal frontier there was a line from Vrede to Bothaspas, continued westward by a series of forts to Harrismith, whence the line went on, still westward, to Bethlehem, and thence down to the Basutoland border at Fouriesburg.
In the north-eastern and northern districts for instance, in Ladybrand, Winburg, Kroonstad, Heilbron, Bethlehem, Harrismith and Vrede there were still many families, and these could not be sent to Boshof or to Hoopstad or to the Colony. And when, reduced to dire want, the commandos should be obliged to abandon these districts, their wives and families would have to be left behind to starve!
But the commandos from Vrede and Harrismith, with part of the Bethlehem commando, still remained as watchers on the Drakensberg. When I arrived at Heilbron, late at night, I received a report that fighting was taking place on the Rhenoster River, between Heilbron and Lindley, and that General J.B. Wessels and Commandant Steenekamp had been driven back.
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