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Updated: July 16, 2025
Then she rose with difficulty, for the dropsy in her limbs made her inactive, and walked with the help of a stick to the stoep, where she sat down, looking across the plain at the solemn range of the Drakensberg and thinking without doubt, of that night of fear when my grandfather had rushed down its steeps upon the great schimmel to save her daughter and his wife from an awful death.
Presently the dotted head and open files of a battalion emerged from behind the guns, changing direction half-left to cover their flank. The batteries pushed on with the one battalion ahead of them. It was half-past eight, and brilliant sunshine; the air was dead still; through the clefts of the nearer hills the blue peaks of the Drakensberg looked as if you could shout across to them. Boom!
I could only conjecture them to be English from their presence on the exposed ridge, and from their regular though widely extended formation. They were hardly visible except as a series of black points. Thunderclouds hung over the Drakensberg behind, and the sun was obscured. Yet I had no doubt in my own mind that the position was won. It was five o'clock, or a little later.
It was now bitterly cold, the snow-topped Drakensberg keeping the temperature at an uncomfortable proximity to zero. But the men were nearly all well provided with warm khaki uniforms reaped at Roodewal, the mountains were full of cattle and corn, and we felt that we could easily hold these almost inaccessible heights against the British cordon formed outside. But it was fated otherwise.
Presently we topped a ridge and entered a very extensive basin of country a huge circular valley of green grass with sloping hills apparently on all sides and towards the west, bluffs, rising range above range, to the bright purple wall of the Drakensberg.
The distance is dulled by mists, and the Drakensberg peaks are only dimly visible, but there are clouds of dust winding that way, and we know that the Boer waggons are trekking on the off-chance that a general retirement may be forced upon them.
The veld had been burned unusually early to ensure a speedy grass-crop after the first rains, there had been a collecting of horses, a distribution of rifles and ammunition. The Free State farmers, who graze their sheep and cattle upon Natal soil during the winter, had driven them off to places of safety behind the line of the Drakensberg.
He himself, with the members of the Government, had gone to Bethlehem. General Marthinus Prinsloo was there too; he had resigned his post of Commander-in-Chief of the commandos which guarded the Drakensberg. Commandant Hattingh of Vrede had been chosen in his place, and he also was at Bethlehem. A difficulty now arose as to Prinsloo's position.
There we might join some other party of the emigrant Boers for choice, that of Retief, of whose arrival over the Drakensberg I was able to tell them. That point settled, we made our preparations. To begin with, I had only enough oxen for two wagons, whereas, even if we abandoned the rest of them, we must take at least four.
Towering over his left front was the Drakensberg Range through which Botha's Pass runs into the Orange Free State; on his right front was the Buffalo River with a difficult country beyond; and on his front was Majuba of ill-omened memory and Laing's Nek, over which the road to Volksrust and the Transvaal passed.
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