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It was only when the train was in motion that food and drink were passed up from below, as these too would assuredly, had they been seen, have been confiscated by the brutal tormentors. When they steamed into Standerton in the afternoon, the distress of the women and children for water was so great that men determined at all costs to endeavour to get some for them.
I therefore pushed on, following the wire. It was pretty dark when I reached the foot of a mountain. Right across the cable led me rather a difficult matter tracing it in the dark but at last an open plain on the other side was reached; a few miles further I found one of our men stretched out in the grass by the side of the cable. "Where's the Standerton laager?" "This is where it was.
Up to the end of the month the whole of the Natal army remained strung along the line of communications from Heidelberg to Standerton, waiting for the collection of forage and transport to enable them to march north against Botha's position. On August 8th Buller's troops advanced to the north-east from Paardekop, pushing a weak Boer force with five guns in front of them.
Kritzinger remained in his corner between the Orange and the Caledon and could not be extracted from it; De Wet was still at large. In the Transvaal the leaders were marking time. Viljoen after the Standerton conference withdrew beyond the Delagoa Bay Railway, but was soon driven out of the mountains.
'It has also been reported to me that my own buildings, on the farm Varkenspruit, district Standerton, as well as the house of Field-Cornet Badenhorst, on the adjoining farm, have been totally destroyed, and such of the stock as was not removed was shot dead on the farm. 'Further, there is the sworn declaration of Mrs. Hendrik Badenhorst, which speaks for itself.
We have talked of nothing else for the past three days, and I defy anyone to say anything new about it; it is not a pleasant subject either. Richards, you were in the last war, I know, and took part in the defence of Standerton. Suppose you tell us about that; it is one of the few pleasant memories of that time."
After this nothing further occurred till, by the orders of their escort, they outspanned, an hour or so before sunset, at a spot in the veldt where a faint track forked from the Standerton road. The day had been intensely hot, and our travellers sat in the shade of the cart overpowered and gasping.
Every farmhouse sent out its riflemen, and the trysting-place was the outside of the nearest British fort. All through the country small detachments were surrounded and besieged by the farmers. Standerton, Pretoria, Potchefstroom, Lydenburg, Wakkerstroom, Rustenberg, and Marabastad were all invested and all held out until the end of the war. In the open country we were less fortunate.
England, by her Government, answered the question plainly it matters very little. At Standerton John was again warned that it would be impossible for him to make his way through the Boers at Heidelberg, a town about sixty miles from Pretoria, where the Triumvirate, Kruger, Pretorious, and Joubert, had proclaimed the Republic.
The new models, however, were only six hundred yards apart, and were connected by such impenetrable strands of wire that a Boer pithily described it by saying that if one's hat blew over the line anywhere between Ermelo and Standerton one had to walk round Ermelo to fetch it.
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