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Prudence advised no delay, and the consequence was that, beginning with the month of August, and, indeed, the very first days which followed upon the failure of the Bloemfontein Conference, a stream of people from the Transvaal began migrating toward Cape Colony, which was supposed to be the place where their sufferings would find a measure of relief that they vainly imagined would prove adequate to their needs.
To supply men and animals with daily food, and to accumulate on the spot twenty-five days' provisions and supplies of military stores for the further advance to the Vaal, there had to be brought daily to Bloemfontein, besides the reinforcements of men, 1020 tons by a single-track railroad on which many bridges had been destroyed.
Such was the case after Cronje's capture, the occupation of Bloemfontein and Pretoria, and Prinsloo's surrender. When Lord Roberts left South Africa, the war, it was said, was practically over! The British were placed at a great disadvantage at the outbreak of hostilities.
A week later a small number of the more daring burghers sallied toward Bloemfontein and found that not a single British soldier was north of that city. So fearful were they of the British army before the discovery of their foolish flight that two thousand cavalrymen could have sent them all across the Vaal river.
Durban boasted a population of thirty thousand, Pietermaritzburg of twenty thousand, and Ladysmith of four thousand five hundred, being four hundred larger than that of Dundee. It was the point at which the line of railway forked, one branch running north through Glencoe to the Transvaal, the other northwest through Van Reenen's Pass to Bloemfontein.
The next morning we rode out to the Sand River to see the Boer positions near the drift, and met President Steyn in his Cape cart coming from them on his way to the bridge. Ever since the occupation of Bloemfontein, the London papers had been speaking of him as "the Late President," as though he were dead.
A lovely view of the town from here, in a hollow of encircling hills, half-buried in trees, looking something like Florence in the distance. I can hardly believe we are really here when I think of the hopeless depression of June and May at Bloemfontein. Much to our disgust, we weren't allowed to go down to the town in the afternoon.
The Johannesburg Police, who had been among their corps d'elite, had been badly mauled, and the burghers were impressed by one more example of the impossibility of standing in anything approaching to open country against disciplined troops, Roberts had not captured the guns, but the road had been cleared for him to Bloemfontein and, what is more singular, to Pretoria; for though hundreds of miles intervene between the field of Driefontein and the Transvaal capital, he never again met a force which was willing to look his infantry in the eyes in a pitched battle.
The responsibility of the surrender was fixed upon him and he was deprived of his command. He had no doubt been in a false position during the first fortnight of the advance from Bloemfontein when he was kept trailing behind a junior officer, and this slight perhaps affected his judgment, but he was constitutionally incapable of viewing a situation synoptically and perspectively.
It was then, after they had rallied again, that General De Wet, on the eve of the 28th of March, left Brandfort with a commando 1500 strong and moved in the direction of Winburg. De Wet had made up his mind to surprise the English garrison which guarded the Bloemfontein Waterworks at Sanna's Post, and so cut off the water supply of Bloemfontein.
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