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Updated: June 3, 2025
There have been several attempts to explain this affair. It was said in our laagers at the time that Colonel Sprague, immediately after his surrender, remarked to our commandant that he would shoot the Lindley telegraphist if he could get hold of him, because the latter had tampered with his message asking for reinforcements.
We wanted to get rid of them all, but they were interminable. When we thought we had shaken them off, and that we were at last in advance, we would come upon a group of them resting on the same ground their shells had torn up during the battle the day before. We passed Boer laagers marked by empty cans and broken saddles and black, cold camp-fires.
The Boers had moved one of their waggon laagers a little further back, but the main camps were unchanged. With a telescope I could make out where their hospital was in a cottage by a wood and I followed an ambulance waggon driving at a trot to three or four points on ridge and plain, gathering up the sick or wounded, and returning to hospital.
Whenever Presidents Kruger and Steyn went to the commandos, they held out their right hands to all the burghers who approached them, and one might have imagined that every Boer was personally acquainted with every other one in the republics. It was the same with strangers who visited the laagers, and many a sore wrist testified to the Boer's republicanism.
Three weeks after the abortive attack of November 9, Joubert returned from his expedition to Estcourt. A council of war was held, and an assault on the Platrand was determined on for the 30th. On the previous evening the commandos detailed as covering parties on the left flank went into position on Rifleman's Ridge, and awaited the main attack. Meanwhile much had happened in the laagers.
As has been pointed out in other chapters, the officers had no power over their men, and consequently the armies were divided into two classes of burghers: those who volunteered their services whenever there was a battle, and those who remained in the laagers the "Bible-readers," as they were called by some of the more youthful Boers.
This was the reason for the issue of the proclamation, which well portrays the character of its framers. Life at Pretoria was varied by occasional sorties against the Boer laagers, situated at different points in the neighbourhood, generally about six or eight miles from the town.
The two men went out on patrol and by night crept up a kopje behind which about three hundred British cavalrymen were bivouacking. The men were twenty miles distant from their laagers at Dundee and only a short distance from Ladysmith, but they lay down and slept on the other side of the kopje, less than a hundred yards from the cavalrymen.
The tents of another large camp showed among the bushes on Lombard's Nek, where the Helpmakaar road passes between Lombard's Kop and Bulwan, and many waggon laagers were in sight beyond. At the foot of the flat-topped Middle Hill on the south-west, the Boers have placed two more guns to trouble the Manchesters further. But our defences along the whole ridge are now very strong.
But it was not only the women and children who were on the verge of starvation; the burghers still left in the laagers were in the same predicament. What, moreover, was to happen to the prisoners of war, if the struggle were to be continued? And to the families in the camps? The delegates must not forget those families.
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