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With their help he had kept the German colony intact until 1916, and even held at Taveta an angle of British East Africa. Smith-Dorrien had been selected for the command in the autumn of 1915, but ill-health prevented him from taking it up, and in February 1916 General Smuts arrived at Mombasa to conduct the campaign.
A permanent post had been established at Rhenoster under the charge of Colonel Spens of the Shropshires, with his own regiment and several guns. Smith-Dorrien, one of the youngest and most energetic of the divisional commanders, had at the same time undertaken the supervision and patrolling of the line.
Methuen on the morning of the 10th struck away to the west, sending messages back to Broadwood and Kitchener in the rear that they should bear to the east, and so nurse the Boer column between them. At the same time he sent on a messenger, who unfortunately never arrived, to warn Smith-Dorrien at Bank Station to throw himself across De Wet's path.
General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien was very much taken with the "tam" as a trench cap. On the morning of March 8th, while Major MacKenzie and I were having coffee, the Germans began shelling our quarters. We were in an old brick house on the Rue Pettion and our breakfast was rudely disturbed by several loud reports.
In front of De Wet, Smith-Dorrien was holding the Klerksdorp railway, but again he misled his pursuers, and instead of trekking north after he had crossed the Gatsrand, a movement which Smith-Dorrien anticipated and provided for, he changed direction, and on August 11 passed over the railway at a section which had been left unoccupied on Smith-Dorrien's right flank.
Field pieces firing at point-blank range were used to cut the barbed wire entanglements defending the enemy intrenchments, while howitzers and bombing airplanes were used to drop high explosives into the defenseless earthworks. Sir Douglas Haig, later to become the commander-in-chief of the British forces, was in command of the first army. Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien commanded the second army.
On the right bank Methuen, supported by Smith-Dorrien, was watching the drifts. He did his best, but his force was insufficient for the purpose, and on August 6 De Wet, with it is said no less than 400 wagons, entered the Transvaal at Schoeman's Drift, the greater part of Methuen's force having been sent to hold a drift lower down.
The town of Belfast was strongly held by Smith-Dorrien, with 1750 men, of which 1300 were infantry belonging to the Royal Irish, the Shropshires, and the Gordons. The perimeter of defence, however, was fifteen miles, and each little fort too far from its neighbour for mutual support, though connected with headquarters by telephone.
It is said that Smith-Dorrien had been so imperfectly made acquainted with Kitchener's plan, that he was under the impression that he had been sent to the north bank to prevent the Boers breaking out of the laager, and not to attack them upstream.
The cavalry thus delayed was intended to reinforce a column under Smith-Dorrien, who had come up into the Transvaal with Ian Hamilton's column, and who was marching from Krugersdorp to take off the pressure from the south on Baden-Powell at Rustenburg; Olifant's Nek, over which the road to the town passed, being in the possession of the Boers.
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