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We are fifty-four miles, across mountains, from Harrismith on the east, and seventy or eighty from Kroonstadt on the west. All supplies from the latter must come by ox-waggons over dozens of bad drifts, with raiding Boers about, and it is easy to see how an army might be starved before it knew it. We are very short now, I believe.
The Boers were, of course, very much excited, and the English merchant was looked upon scornfully and contemptuously. One Boer had already drawn up a memorandum of what he considered should be the modus operandi in dealing with the storekeepers. Two or three were to be hanged, and the others were to be tied up in front of their own buildings and shot down like crows. That was in Harrismith.
We heard afterwards that they had suffered much more severely than we had done. A Success at Tweefontein The column had marched to Harrismith. It was time that I accomplished something further, and I determined that the next blow I struck should be a heavy one.
I have often been present at the death-bed and at the burial of those who have been nearest to my heart father, mother, brother and friend but the grief which I felt on those occasions was not to be compared with what I now underwent at the burial of my Nation! It was at Reitz that the commandos of Vrede, Harrismith, Heilbron and Bethlehem laid down their arms.
The place was the point of bifurcation of the main line, which divides at this little town into one branch running to Harrismith in the Orange Free State, and the other leading through the Dundee coal fields and Newcastle to the Laing's Nek tunnel and the Transvaal.
Soon after daylight dropping bullets began to whiz past my window and crack upon the tin roof in quite a shower. The Boer snipers had crept up into Brooks's Farm, beyond the Harrismith railway, and were firing at the heads of our men on Junction Hill. Whenever they missed the edge of the hill the bullets fell on my cottage. At last some guns opened fire from our Naval battery on Cove Redoubt.
Though there was no night attack a peculiar manoeuvre was tried, but without success. On the sixty miles of line between here and Harrismith the Boers have only one engine, and it struck some one how fine it would be to send an empty engine into it at full speed from our side.
Colonel Firman's brigade was camped between Bethlehem and Harrismith, at Elands River bridge, where he was building the line of blockhouses between the two towns. This camp was so well entrenched that there was no possibility of storming it, and I knew that so long as Colonel Firman thought I was still in the neighbourhood he would not dare to come out and give me an opportunity of attacking him.
It was decided that a force of two thousand burghers, under Commandant C.J. De Villiers, of Harrismith, as Vice-Vechtgeneraal, should go down into Natal, and that the remaining forces should guard the passes on the Drakensberg. Let me say, in parenthesis, that the laws of the Orange Free State make no allusion to the post of Vechtgeneraal.
Nearer and nearer these two great divisions approached each other, until at last they stretched without any break from the Bethlehem-Lindley to the Frankfort-Vrede line of blockhouses. On the 21st of February the whole column moved towards Vrede and Harrismith.
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