me battery
eighteen months before. When fifteen miles south of the Waterworks, at
a place called Vlakfontein (another Vlakfontein from that of General
Dixon's engagement), the small force was surrounded and captured by
Ackermann's commando. The gunner officer, Lieutenant Barry, died beside
his guns in the way that gunner officers have. Guns and men were taken,
however, the latter to be released, and the former to be recovered a
week or two later by the British columns. It is certainly a credit to
the Boers that the spring campaign should have opened by four British
guns falling into their hands, and it is impossible to withhold our
admiration for those gallant farmers who, after two years of exhausting
warfare, were still able to turn upon a formidable and victorious enemy,
and to renovate their supplies at his expense.

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. In this a detachment of the
Highland Scouts raised by the public spirit of Lord Lovat was surprised
at night and very severely handled by Kritzinger's commando. The loss of
Colonel Murray, their commander, of the adjutant of the same name, and
of forty-two out of eighty of the Scouts, shows how fell was the attack,
which broke as sudden and as strong as a South African thunderstorm upon
the unconscious camp. The Boers appear to have eluded the outposts and
crept right among the sleeping troops, as they did in the case of the
Victorians at Wilmansrust. Twelve gunners were also hit, and the
only field gun taken. The retiring Boers were swiftly followed up by
Thorneycroft's column, however, and the gun was retaken, together with
twenty of Kritzinger's men. It must be confessed that there seems some
irony in the fact that, within five days of the British ruling by which
the Boers were no longer a military force, these non-belligerents had
inflicted a loss of nearly six hundred men killed, wounded, or taken.
Two small commandos, that of Koch in the Orange River Colony, and that
of Carolina, had been captured by Williams and Benson. Combined they
only numbered a hundred and nine men, but here, as always, they were men
who could never be replaced.

Those who had followed the war with care, and had speculated upon the
future, were prepared on hearing of Botha's