near
Cradock, in which the Boers were strong enough to hold their own; but on
the same date near Murraysburg, Lukin, the gallant colonial gunner, with
ninety men rode into 150 of Lategan's band and captured ten of them,
with a hundred horses. On July 27th a small party of twenty-one Imperial
Yeomanry was captured, after a gallant resistance, by a large force of
Boers at the Doorn River on the other side of the Colony. The Kaffir
scouts of the British were shot dead in cold blood by their captors
after the action. There seems to be no possible excuse for the repeated
murders of coloured men by the Boers, as they had themselves from the
beginning of the war used their Kaffirs for every purpose short of
actually fighting. The war had lost much of the good humour which marked
its outset. A fiercer feeling had been engendered on both sides by the
long strain, but the execution of rebels by the British, though much to
be deplored, is still recognised as one of the rights of a belligerent.
When one remembers the condonation upon the part of the British of the
use of their own uniforms by the Boers, of the wholesale breaking of
paroles, of the continual use of expansive bullets, of the abuse of the
pass system and of the red cross, it is impossible to blame them for
showing some severity in the stamping out of armed rebellion within
their own Colony. If stern measures were eventually adopted it was
only after extreme leniency had been tried and failed. The loss of five
years' franchise as a penalty for firing upon their own flag is surely
the most gentle correction which an Empire ever laid upon a rebellious
people.

At the beginning of August the connected systematic work of French's
columns began to tell. In a huge semicircle the British were pushing
north, driving the guerillas in front of them. Scheepers in his usual
wayward fashion had broken away to the south, but the others had been
unable to penetrate the cordon and were herded over the Stormberg to
Naauwport line. The main body of the Boers was hustled swiftly along
from August 7th to August 10th, from Graaf-Reinet to Thebus, and thrust
over the railway line at that point with some loss of men and a great
shedding of horses. It was hoped that the blockhouses on the railroad
would have held the enemy, but they slipped across by night and got into
the Steynsburg district, where Gorringe's colonials took up the running.
On August 18th he followed the commandos from Steyns