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Updated: May 16, 2025
And when afterwards informed of the "mistake" they did not seem to care, but went on serenely pandering to the butcher's genial ambidextrousness. On Thursday a good many shells fell in the neighbourhood of Scholtz's Nek. With an energy which few had hitherto been disposed to give him credit for possessing, the enemy continued to engross himself in establishing, as it were, a fixity of tenure.
Captain Nek made treaties of amity and commerce with the potentates of Ternate, Tydor, and other Molucca islands. The King of Candy on the Island of Ceylon, lord of the odoriferous fields of cassia which perfume those tropical seas, was glad to learn how to exchange the spices of the equator for the thousand fabrics and products of western civilization which found their great emporium in Holland.
The dawn was just breaking and by its light I saw a strange scene. About fifty yards away in the narrow nek that ran over some boulders to the site of our huts, stood what seemed to be the goddess Nomkubulwana as I had seen her on the point of rock in the Vale of Bones. She wore the same radiant dress and in the dim glow had all the appearance of a white woman.
At the end of the eighteenth mile the cars, going at a quite illegal speed, jumped a ridge between two heather-clad moors, which in South Africa would have been called a nek, and dived down along a white road leading into a broad forest track, sunlit now, but bordered on either side by the twilight of towering pines and firs through which the sunlight filtered only in little flakes, which lay upon the last year's leaves and cones, somewhat as an electric light might have fallen on a monkish manuscript of the thirteenth century.
A quarter of an hour later, as the dawn was breaking, we passed through a kind of nek of rough stones bordering the flat land, and emerged into a compact body on to the edge of the grassy plain. Here the word was given to halt for a reason that became clear to me so soon as I was out of the rocks. For there, marching rapidly, not half a mile away, were some five hundred white-robed men.
Else we were surely taken and the war ended. When at last we struggled over Olifant's Nek, it was to find the pass held by friends, not foes, many signs of the enemy's occupation, from plundered farm-houses to hundreds of biscuit tins, strewing the ground. Our waggons were drawn up in a line behind the mountain, and we manned the passes, confident in our ability to hold them.
The inaction invited the retreating enemy to halt and occupy the Biggarsberg Range; only a few days after Buller had informed Lord Roberts that he did not expect that any stand would be made south of Laing's Nek.
From the moment of leaving Bethlehem, at which place we remained nearly a fortnight while the General placed his columns, we entered among the hills and fighting was continuous. Our passage to force was Relief's Nek, and, as we had expected, the Boers made a determined stand there.
But, alas for fallen hopes, and alas for the wasted efforts of gallant men! Olifant's Nek had been abandoned and De Wet had passed safely through it into the plains beyond, where De la Rey's force was still in possession. In vain Methuen's weary column forced the Magato Pass and descended into Rustenburg. The enemy was in a safe country once more.
Eight hundred prisoners may seem no great loss when compared with a Sedan, or even with an Ulm; but such matters are comparative, and the force which laid down its arms at Nicholson's Nek is the largest British force which has surrendered since the days of our great grandfathers, when the egregious Duke of York commanded in Flanders.
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