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Updated: June 16, 2025
The latter was now out of the running, for although Kelly-Kenny had already had a nine hours' march from Waterval Drift beginning soon after midnight, by 5 in the afternoon of February 14 the VIth Division was ready to resume its march to support French at Klip Drift, some hours before Tucker came in.
These four hills and the ground between them Buller proposed to occupy, and then pass between Cingolo and Monte Cristo to a drift of the Tugela N.E. of Monte Cristo, cross the river and advance by the Klip Riyer on Bulwana.
This effected, the British would have a stern chase, proverbially long, and in this instance certainly fruitless. Cronje nearly succeeded. Early on Friday morning the British at Klip Drift saw north of them a great cloud of dust, moving eastward. It was the Boer convoy, in rear of which doubtless was their army.
Owing to delays in distributing provisions and fodder, French could not start again until 11.30 A.M. The loss of the five early hours, says an eye-witness, cost 100 horses, which died or failed in the march that day. The goal now was Klip Drift, about twenty-five miles distant.
The motto of Buller's Army was festina lente and its track towards Ladysmith was in zigzag. On the following day Hlangwhane was occupied by the British troops, and before noon on February 20, all the Boers had withdrawn to the left bank of the Tugela, and Buller was favourably placed for the advance by way of the Klip River on Bulwana.
In anticipation of such a development one field-battery had been placed on the rough slope that juts northward from Range Post, through which runs the main road to Colenso in the south and to several of the Drakensberg passes in the west. Up through a gorge deeply fretted by Klip River this battery commanded the long bare nek.
These various streams find their way sooner or later to the Tugela, itself one of the many, but which carries its own name until it reaches the Indian Ocean, some fifty miles north-east of Durban. Another tributary called the Klip flows through the camp at Ladysmith. The channels which these streams have cut for themselves in time of torrent are both steep-banked and deep.
As night closes in there are cheers rolling towards us from the plain beyond Klip River, where our volunteers are on patrol. Ladysmith, so quiet and undemonstrative in its patient endurance of a long siege, goes wild at the sound. Everybody divines its meaning. Our friends from the victorious army of the south are coming! All the town rushes out to meet them, where they must cross a drift.
The arrival of the VIth Division on the morning of February 15 set French free to resume his march on Kimberley. The two commandos had on the previous day joined hands with Lubbe, who, after he was pushed out of French's way, crossed the Modder at Klip Kraal Drift and worked round to a position north of Klip Drift.
The others sent substitutes, perhaps because they did not like to expose themselves to the change of air. We rested some days at the Klip River, in the Orange Free State, and from thence I was sent with a small escort of burghers by our General to Harrismith to meet a number of Free State officers.
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