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Updated: June 25, 2025
Although their destination, like ours, was Lichtenburg, we marched at different times of the day, for even in this large country there was not room on the road for both brigades. While they were yet asleep in their bivouacs we were at breakfast, and their reveille generally found us setting out on the march. The awaking of a column on these dark, cold mornings is ghostly and mysterious.
He had hardly started when news came in that an isolated garrison seventy miles away in the N.W. was threatened. Delarey had a definite objective in view when he disappeared, his native town of Lichtenburg. The place was one of many for which Methuen, with an attenuated force, was responsible; and now he had been called away to a town in trouble in the opposite direction.
This hard-working General, having garrisoned Zeerust and Lichtenburg, had left his old district and journeyed with a force which consisted largely of Bushmen and Yeomanry to the disturbed parts of Bechuanaland which had been invaded by De Villiers. Here he cleared the country as far as Vryburg, which he had reached in the middle of January, working round to Kuruman and thence to Taungs.
Zeerust and Lichtenburg had each been garrisoned and provisioned by Lord Methuen before he carried his column away to the south-west, where much rough and useful work awaited him. The two towns were at once invested by the enemy, who made an attack upon each of them. That upon Zeerust, on January 7th, was a small matter and easily repulsed.
General H. Lemmer, a promising soldier, whom we could ill spare, was killed soon after while storming Lichtenburg under General De la Rey, an engagement in which we did not succeed. We had much trouble in replacing these two brave generals, whose names will live for all time in the history of the Boer Republics.
At the same time, he sent Smuts to the Hartebeestfontein district, out of which he had just been driven. The audacity of the act was justified, for Smuts maintained himself against Babington during the whole of April. Early in May a determined effort was made to clear the district. Methuen after he had relieved Hoopstad was recalled to Mafeking, and then went to Lichtenburg.
Hunter and the components of his force were to rendezvous at Lichtenburg on June 7th. Setting out from Maribogo on Sunday morning, June 3rd, we entered the Transvaal at about midday, and reached Geysdorp in the afternoon. Hart's brigade had left Maribogo a few hours before us, and we passed ahead of it at Geysdorp.
On the night of Sunday, March 23rd, the British horsemen passed stealthily in column through the De la Rey country, and then, spreading out into a line, which from the left wing at Lichtenburg to the right wing at Commando Drift measured a good eighty miles, they proceeded to sweep back upon their traces.
From that point, with a force which contained a large proportion of yeomanry and of Australian bushmen, he conducted a long series of operations in the difficult and important district which lies between Rustenburg, Lichtenburg, and Zeerust.
From this point on May 1st he railed his troops to Mafeking, whence he trekked to Lichtenburg, and south as far as his old fighting ground of Haartebeestefontein, having one skirmish upon the way and capturing a Boer gun. Thence he returned to Mafeking, where he had to bid adieu to those veteran Yeomanry who had been his comrades on so many a weary march.
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