he pressure put by them
upon the farmers, had raised the whole country once again, and the work
of pacification had to be set about once more, with harsher measures
than before. A continuous barrier of barbed-wire fencing had been
erected from Bloemfontein to the Basuto border, a distance of eighty
miles, and this was now strongly held by British posts. From the south
Bruce Hamilton, Hickman, Thorneycroft, and Haig swept upwards, stripping
the country as they went in the same way that French had done in the
Eastern Transvaal, while Pilcher's column waited to the north of the
barbed-wire barrier. It was known that Fourie, with a considerable
commando, was lurking in this district, but he and his men slipped at
night between the British columns and escaped. Pilcher, Bethune, and
Byng were able, however, to send in 200 prisoners and very great
numbers of cattle. On April 10th Monro, with Bethune's Mounted Infantry,
captured eighty fighting Boers near Dewetsdorp, and sixty more were
taken by a night attack at Boschberg. There is no striking victory to
record in these operations, but they were an important part of that
process of attrition which was wearing the Boers out and helping to
bring the war to an end. Terrible it is to see that barren countryside,
and to think of the depths of misery to which the once flourishing and
happy Orange Free State had fallen, through joining in a quarrel with a
nation which bore it nothing but sincere friendship and goodwill. With
nothing to gain and everything to lose, the part played by the Orange
Free State in this South African drama is one of the most inconceivable
things in history. Never has a nation so deliberately and so causelessly
committed suicide.

CHAPTER 33. THE NORTHERN OPERATIONS FROM JANUARY TO APRIL, 1901.

Three consecutive chapters have now given some account of the campaign
of De Wet, of the operations in the Transvaal up to the end of the year
1900, and of the invasion of Cape Colony up to April 1901. The present
chapter will deal with the events in the Transvaal from the beginning
of the new century. The military operations in that country, though
extending over a very large area, may be roughly divided into two
categories: the attacks by the Boers upon British posts, and the
aggressive sweeping movements of British columns. Under the first
heading come the attacks on Belfast, on Zuurfontein, on Kaalfontein,
on Zeerust, on Modderfontein, and on Lichtenburg, bes