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We were off for the front at last, and I shall now, making a few necessary alterations, transcribe my diary, as I wrote it from day to day and often hour to hour, under all sorts of varying conditions. June 21. 7 A.M. I am writing this on the seat of a gun in an open truck on the way by rail to Kroonstadt. I have been trying to sleep on the floor, but it wasn't a success, owing to frozen feet.
Immediately south of Kroonstadt we crossed the Vaal River, with its fine high-level bridge reduced to atoms by dynamite.
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.
How this came about cannot be expressed more clearly than in the words of Paul Botha, who, as I have already said, was a voortrekker like Kruger himself, and a Boer of the Boers, save that he seems to have been a man with wider and more liberal views than his fellows. He was member for Kroonstadt in the Free State Raad.
Marvellous to relate, in the early afternoon we found our train in the station, and, climbing into our carriage once more, we proceeded on our road without delay, congratulating ourselves on our good fortune in not being held up at Kroonstadt, as had been the fate of many travellers going south.
No fresh supplies had come in for nine months, and the whole place was stripped. On the whole, we thought we had done pretty well, as we had half a sack of things, and another one full of fuel laboriously collected on the way back. Rumours in the town were rife. All agreed we could do nothing till a supply-convoy comes in, now expected from Kroonstadt.
We reached Kroonstadt about dark; but remained outside all night, supperless and freezing. June 22. I walked about most of the night, and got an engine driver to squirt some hot water into a mess-tin to make tea with out of tablets. In early morning a train disgorged a crowd of men who had been prisoners with the Boers at Pretoria, some ever since the first battle.
Latterly there have been all sorts of mysterious reports about the Boers having got behind Roberts, re-taken Kroonstadt and cut the railway, massacring various regiments, whose names change hourly. A camp rumour is a wonderful thing. Generally speaking, there are two varieties, cook-shop rumours and officers' servants' rumours.
Outside there is a murmur of stablemen trying to fit shrunk nose-bags on to restive horses, varied by the squeal and thump of an Argentine, as he gets home in the ribs of a neighbour who has been fed before him." On the day after this was written our long period of waiting came to an end with orders to go at once to Kroonstadt.
Now Brandfort was reached, now Kroonstadt, and at last the Diamond City, Johannesburg no, not last, Pretoria lies beyond, and by-and-by the victorious forces entered the capital of the Transvaal, and the British flag symbol of world-wide empire floated over the Government Buildings. And here we pause.
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