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Updated: May 8, 2025
"You have a good heart, Allan," said Marais, sinking back upon his stool and resuming his blanket, while Marie looked despairingly first at one and then at the other of us. Half an hour later I was on the road in the very worst of tempers. "Mind what you are about," called Vrouw Prinsloo after me.
"No; they were writing reports for your civil administration blokes to stuff in the wastebasket, and being called mailed-fist-and-rattling-sabre alarmists for their pains." He turned away from Keaveney. "Barney, where is Dirk Prinsloo?" "Aboard his ship. He hitched a ride to the airport with Jarman, when he was here picking up air-crews." "Call him.
When I came to myself two weeks afterwards, for I had been very ill and in delirium, I was lying in the house of the Vrouw Prinsloo alone. The Boers had all gone, east and west and north and south, and the dead were long buried. They had taken Henri Marais with them, so I was told, dragging him away in a bullock cart, to which he was tied, for he was raving mad.
"As I should have been, Mynheer Pereira, twice over if you could have had your way," I replied. "What do you mean, Allan?" broke in Retief. "I will tell you what he means," exclaimed the Vrouw Prinsloo, shaking her fat fist at Pereira. "That yellow dog means that twice he has tried to murder Allan Allan, who saved his life and ours.
It was decided that he should take action in what was apparently the direction of greatest risk. With 400 men he burst through the line of Constabulary posts, and on January 24 joined J. Prinsloo in the Wilge River Valley, within the so-called "protected area."
Here I may state, however, that within a few days Marie and everyone else in the camp knew the story in detail, except perhaps Marais, to whom no one spoke of his nephew. Evidently Vrouw Prinsloo had found herself unable to keep secret such an example of the villainy of her aversion, Pereira.
With the surrender of Prinsloo a large army was disengaged, and it was obvious that if De Wet remained where he was he must soon be surrounded. On the other hand, there was no place of refuge to the south of him.
Marie told the Vrouw Prinsloo nothing, except that she proposed to drug me if I would not go undrugged. Then the vrouw must hide me as best she could, in the grain-pit or elsewhere, or, if I had my senses about me, let me hide myself. Afterwards she, Marie, would face the Boers and tell them to find me if they wanted me. The vrouw answered that she had now thought of a better plan.
They were closeted closely for some hours before the final agreement could be arrived at. Prinsloo wanted terms for his men which the British generals would not concede, the final agreement being that the burghers were to ride in and throw down their arms under our flag.
True, a few of them, such as Cronje, De la Rey, and Prinsloo had been leaders in Kaffir wars, and in such the burghers placed implicit confidence. Needless almost to state that in most of these so-called Kaffir warriors the Boers were utterly disappointed. It was one thing to attack natives badly armed, it was another thing to face an organised army well equipped with death-dealing instruments.
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