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Updated: May 3, 2025
A good deal was occurring out here which did not quite tally with that theory, but those things were ignored or very slightly referred to, so that we on the spot wondered to see the war drop out of sight, and were puzzled to read in the Times that only a few desperadoes remained in the field just at the time that two commandoes were invading the Colony, another raiding Natal, a garrison and two guns captured at Dewetsdorp, and the line blown up in ten different places.
The sidewalks were crowded with burghers, but no one noticed him. This was due probably to the fact that the Boers wore no distinctive uniform, and that with them in their commandoes were many English Colonials who wore khaki riding breeches, and many Americans, French, Germans, and Russians, in every fashion of semi-uniform.
Nothing is so difficult to estimate as Boer numbers, and we never take enough account of the enemy's mobility. They can concentrate rapidly at any given point and gain the appearance of numbers which they don't possess. However, the balloon reports the presence of laagers of ten commandoes in sight.
Then again, we should not have crossed the river in one commando, but should have divided the force into at least twelve or fifteen commandoes, and these should have entered the Colony at different points, all moving in different directions, then the enemy could not have concentrated their hosts on us as they did.
For a moment they stood looking at the great camp far away to right and left, and to the lone mountains yonder, where the Boer commandoes held the passes and trained their merciless armament upon all approaches. Then he said at last: "Why have you come here? You had your work in England." "What is my work?" she asked. "To heal the wounded," he answered. "I am trying to do that," she replied.
Rosalt remarked that "it was a singular circumstance that in the different colonial Kafir wars, as also in the Basutu wars, one did not hear of destitute children being found by the commandoes, and asked how it was that every petty commando that took the field in this Republic invariably found numbers of destitute children.
The separate commandoes were herded together in big groups of several hundred men, sitting and lying about and talking. The ox-waggons and battered Cape-carts were drawn up together in a great array; but the busiest part of it all was the division of the horses into mobs fit or unfit for remounts, and the distribution of them to the various regiments. Rimington superintended this job.
Our commandoes, when driven against them, always had sufficient pluck and courage to cut the wires between them, and so they crossed the lines at almost any point they pleased. That we have crossed and recrossed them frequently is proof enough that they were, in this respect, not a success. The barbed wire fences, however complicated, were easily cut.
Besides, we intended, as soon as we were on the other side of the line, to divide our force into several commandoes and let these take different courses so that the enemy would not be able to concentrate any longer all their men on us. Thus wearily we dragged on through mud and rain to the line.
He sent half his police to the Berg to reinforce the commandoes, bidding them get into touch with the post at Blaauwildebeestefontein. A little after two o'clock a diversion occurred. Henriques succeeded in crossing the road three miles east of Main Drift. He had probably left the kraal early in the night and had tried to cross farther west, but had been deterred by the patrols.
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