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Updated: May 28, 2025
Six officers and fifty men killed with about a hundred and twenty wounded made up the British losses, to which two guns would certainly have been added but for the gallant counter-attack of the infantry. With Dargai and Vlakfontein to their credit the Derbys have green laurels upon their war-worn colours.
My informant, the Boer leader, said that both then and to-day Dr. Jameson's men behaved with great gallantry, and he also said that admirable arrangements had been made at Krugersdorp for nursing the wounded on both sides. This morning the Boers took up a position at Vlakfontein, eight miles on the Johannesburg side of Krugersdorp, on a circuitous road to the south by which Dr.
Kemp, however, had returned to the Zwartruggens. After the Vlakfontein affair he found columns approaching him from all sides and dissolved his command. Delarey had gone south, and was now in the Orange River Colony.
The men with Kekewich were for the most part the same as those who had fought in the Vlakfontein engagement the Derbys, the 1st Scottish Horse, the Yeomanry, and the 28th R.F.A. Every precaution appears to have been taken by the leader, and his pickets were thrown out so far that ample warning was assured of an attack.
Some appreciable proportion of the British losses during this phase of the war arose from railway accidents caused by the persistent tampering with the lines. On the last occasion, which occurred on October 10th near Vlakfontein, the reinforcements who came to aid the sufferers were themselves waylaid, and lost twenty, mostly of the Rifle Brigade, killed, wounded, or prisoners.
But that nothing like this had happened in South Africa is clear to every one who recalls the names of Lindley, Roodewal, Dewetsdorp, Vlakfontein, Tafelkop and Tweefontein, not to speak of many other glorious battle-fields on which we fought after the so-called annexation.
Surrounded at Scheepers Nek by many hundreds of riflemen in a difficult country, there was no alternative but a surrender, and so sharp and sudden was the Boer advance that the whole action was over in a very short time. The new tactics of the Boers, already used at Vlakfontein, and afterwards to be successful at Brakenlaagte and at Tweebosch, were put in force.
Two days later, hard on the heels of Gough's mishap, of the Vlakfontein incident, and of the annihilation of the squadron of Lancers in the Cape, there was a serious affair at Elands Kloof, near Zastron, in the extreme south of the Orange River Colony.
On the 28th they found themselves at a place called Vlakfontein, immediately south of Oliphant's Nek. On that day there were indications that there were a good many Boers in the neighbourhood. Dixon left a guard over his camp and then sallied out in search of the buried guns.
He was succeeded at Pietersburg by Grenfell. At the end of May Dixon set out westwards from Naauwpoort in the Magaliesberg district on a raiding expedition. He trekked for three days and then ran unexpectedly into a Boer column at Vlakfontein. He was attacked through a veil of smoke from a grass fire which the slim enemy had lit to windward.
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