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About half a mile beyond Modder's Spruit Station we met a man walking along the road in his socks, carrying a pair of heavy boots. He told us he had just escaped from the Boers, after having been, with thirty other miners, their prisoner since Thursday last. His feet were sore from running in the big boots, and he was nearly exhausted.
"I thought it was the brandy," said Jigger with a grin. To all who fought in the war a change of some sort had come. Those who emerged from it to return to England or her far Dominions, or to stay in the land of the veld, of the kranz and the kloof and the spruit, were never the same again.
Two soldiers of the Mounted Infantry killed; one trooper of the Imperial Light Horse slightly, and one officer, Captain Shore the twenty-third officer of this regiment hit during the last three months severely wounded. Venter's Spruit: January 25, 1900.
Down at the foot of the slope, where the drift crossed the spruit, Boers were dragging cannon into position, and in among the waggons which had become congested in the road, burghers and soldiers were engaging in fierce hand-to-hand encounters.
Bronkhorst Spruit engagement is the one during the whole of the war which does not redound to the credit of the Dutch, even if it does not reflect great discredit upon them. If a reasonable time had been allowed Colonel Anstruther to give his reply, the 94th could not then say, as they do say and will say, that they were treacherously surprised.
The troops had to begin operations from a faulty strategical base, as they were aligned along or near the Schoon Spruit blockhouse line, and between the Boers and that line.
Preceded by the Cape carts, which De Wet, in order to disarm suspicion, allowed to cross to the left bank, the column lumbered down the slope into the spruit and was quickly sucked into the trap.
A heavy gun was emplaced by the Boers to the front of the northward section of the defence, on a hill in the angle between the Bell Spruit and the railway to Harrismith.
Meantime, the South African Police extreme left had swept round to the head of the spruit on both sides of which the donga was formed, the South African Mounted Riflemen and more South African Police closed in, the Defence Force unit getting in rear and in flank of the rebels to cut them off.
De Wet was elbowed away westwards from the railway, but he soon circled back, recrossing it at Lieuw Spruit between Rhenoster River Bridge and Heilbron Road Station, where he not only took fifty prisoners, but almost captured Kitchener, who chanced to be passing through at the time.
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