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Updated: May 15, 2025
In the meantime, still ignorant of the forces about him, but finding himself headed off by French, he made his way down to the river and occupied a long stretch of it between Paardeberg Drift and Wolveskraal Drift, hoping to force his way across. This was the situation on the night of Saturday, February 17th.
A fight with Roberts's Horse on Thursday, February 15th; a march of ten miles and a victorious rear-guard action with Lord Kitchener on Friday; a repulse of the forces under Lords Roberts and Kitchener on Saturday, and on Sunday morning the discovery that he and his four thousand men in the river-bed at Paardeberg were surrounded by forty thousand troops of the enemy that was a four days' record which caused the Lion of Potchefstroom merely to show his fangs to his enemy.
After Zand River and Doornkop, Paardeberg and Mafeking, it was plain that the Canadian soldier could hold his own on the field of battle.
The character of a commander perhaps counts for more with British troops than with any others, except the French; and the men who marched with Roberts from Cabul to Candahar, and from Paardeberg to Bloemfontein, could scarcely have carried out those feats of endurance for a general who did not possess both their trust and their love.
They had come to bury the dead from the Dreifontein fight, and from what they told me of the still unburied Boers both there and at Paardeberg, I gathered that their casualties all along the line had been heavier than we had thought. I have said that the neighbourhood of the Boers made our journey exciting, and there was one point at which the excitement became very nearly painful.
The guns even succeeded in throwing a few shells into the laager, but ran short of ammunition. Kitchener, who remained with Kelly-Kenny as military assessor, had early in the day advocated a raid up the river in order to head off Cronje at Paardeberg Drift, but the exhaustion of the troops prevented the enterprise.
The escape of French, by a margin of a few minutes only, made him available for employment in an arena more suited to his capacity than a besieged town; and his subsequent good work in the Cape Colony, south of the Orange River, and during the advance on Kimberley and Bloemfontein, showed how ill the fortune of war served the Boers, when they just failed to capture the train which was taking out of their clutches the soldier who was to relieve Kimberley and head off Cronje at Paardeberg before the relief of Ladysmith was effected.
Enteric fever is always endemic in the country, and especially at Bloemfontein, but there can be no doubt that this severe outbreak had its origin in the Paardeberg water. All through the campaign, while the machinery for curing disease was excellent, that for preventing it was elementary or absent.
No doubt Cronje had already realised that the extreme limit of his resistance was come, but it was to that handful of Sappers and Canadians that the credit is immediately due for that white flag which fluttered on the morning of Majuba Day over the lines of Paardeberg. It was six o'clock in the morning when General Pretyman rode up to Lord Roberts's headquarters.
The Modder forms the major axis of the ellipse, which it enters near Koodoos Drift and leaves at Paardeberg Drift, and like most South African rivers runs in a deep channel between banks intersected by the tributary dongas which the rains have scored in the soft soil, and which afford almost the only shelter from artillery fire. The whole area is commanded by the surrounding kopjes and ridges.
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