Secretary to the Executive Council;
Gordon Fraser, Private Secretary to the President; MacHardy, Assistant
Secretary; Pieter Steyn, brother of the President and Veldtcornet of the
staff; and my other friends in the bodyguard. It was sad to think that
such men were prisoners, and were lost to us so long as the war
continued. We had become rather accustomed to such experiences, but what
made this so hard to bear was that treachery had a hand in it--when the
English took the Government and President Steyn's bodyguard prisoners,
they had had a Free State burgher as their guide.

The vacant posts in the Government had now to be filled up, and the
President appointed the following persons:--In the place of A.P. Cronje,
General C.H. Olivier, as Member of the Executive Council; and in place
of Mr. T. Brain, Mr. W.C.J. Brebner, as Government Secretary. Mr.
Johannes Theron he appointed Secretary to the Executive Council, instead
of Mr. Rocco De Villiers; and Mr. B.J. Du Plessis Private Secretary to
himself in place of Mr. Gordon Fraser.

The President also decided to have, in future, only thirty burghers as
his bodyguard, and appointed Captain Niekerk as their Commandant.

CHAPTER XXX

The Last Proclamation

I now impressed upon my officers as forcibly as I could the importance
of intercepting the communications of the enemy by blowing up their
trains. A mechanical device had been thought of, by which this could be
done. The barrel and lock of a gun, in connexion with a dynamite
cartridge, were placed under a sleeper, so that when a passing engine
pressed the rail on to this machine, it exploded, and the train was
blown up. It was terrible to take human lives in such a manner; still,
however fearful, it was not contrary to the rules of civilized warfare,
and we were entirely within our rights in obstructing the enemy's lines
of communication in this manner.

Owing to this, the English were obliged to place many more thousands of
soldiers along the railway line, in order to keep the track clear. Even
then, the trains, for a considerable time, could not run by night. The
English soon discovered how we arranged these explosions, and the guards
carefully inspected the lines each day to find out if one of these
machines had been placed beneath the rails. We knew that one had been
found and removed, whenever we saw a train pass over the spot without
being blown up. This, however, only made us more careful. We went to the