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That day the English attacked us unawares. While I was at Dewetsdorp, Captain Pretorius had come up to give me a report of his recent doings.
It was Knox's plan therefore to prevent the Boers from breaking to the west and to head them towards the Basuto border. A small column under Parsons had been sent by Hunter from Bloemfontein, and pushed in upon the flank of De Wet, who had on the 12th got back to Dewetsdorp. Again the pursuit became warm, but De Wet's time was not yet come.
In the evening of the day on which the events described in the last chapter occurred, I handed over the command to Generals Piet de Wet and A.P. Cronje, and taking with me three of my staff, rode to Donkerpoort, in the direction of Dewetsdorp, on a reconnoitring expedition.
B.W. Richter father of my valiant Adjutants, B.W. and Jan Richter must have been much surprised that morning when he discovered that something very like an attack was being made on Dewetsdorp. Their schanzes were built of stones, and provided with trenches. On the top of the schanzes sandbags had been placed, with spaces left between them for the rifles.
The combined movement was an admirable piece of work on the part of the enemy. Finding no force in front of them, the combined troops of French, Rundle, and Chermside occupied Dewetsdorp, where the latter remained, while the others pushed on to Thabanchu, the storm centre from which all our troubles had begun nearly a month before.
As we found no rest either for ourselves or our animals in the south-eastern districts of the Orange Free State, we resolved to go to the Winburg and Ladybrand districts. The enemy had pitched their camps all along the main road from Reddersburg to Dewetsdorp, and from there to Wepener. These stations were from six to eight miles apart, and formed a kind of fence.
With the second party I rode off to join the burghers who were under General J.B. Wessels. I came up with Wessels' division on the 6th of April at Badenhorst, on the road from Dewetsdorp to Wepener.
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.
Next day he heard that the British had occupied Dewetsdorp, and soon after that the garrison was retiring on Reddersburg, and the attack on the line, which perhaps he never seriously intended to make, was indefinitely postponed. For as soon as he had disposed of the prisoners of Mostert's Hoek, he cast his eye round the horizon and descried two other isolated garrisons, at Smithfield and Wepener.
In the neighbourhood of Bloemfontein, Reddersburg, and Dewetsdorp, and at every other place where it was possible, his troops had made prisoners of burghers who had remained quietly on their farms. The same course of action had been pursued by the column which fell into our hands at Mostertshoek I myself had liberated David Strauss and four other citizens whom I had found there.
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