orses were weary from a tiring march, it was hoped by
Macdonald's force that they would work round the Boers and make an
attempt to capture either them or their gun. But the horsemen seem not
to have realised the position of the parties, or that possibility
of bringing off a considerable coup, so the action came to a tame
conclusion, the Boers retiring unpursued from their attack. On Thursday,
February 8th, they were found to have withdrawn, and on the same evening
our own force was recalled, to the surprise and disappointment of the
public at home, who had not realised that in directing their attention
to their right flank the column had already produced the effect upon
the enemy for which they had been sent. They could not be left there, as
they were needed for those great operations which were pending. It
was on the 9th that the brigade returned; on the 10th they were
congratulated by Lord Roberts in person; and on the 11th those
new dispositions were made which were destined not only to relieve
Kimberley, but to inflict a blow upon the Boer cause from which it was
never able to recover.

Small, brown, and wrinkled, with puckered eyes and alert manner, Lord
Roberts in spite of his sixty-seven years preserves the figure and
energy of youth. The active open-air life of India keeps men fit for the
saddle when in England they would only sit their club armchairs, and
it is hard for any one who sees the wiry figure and brisk step of Lord
Roberts to realise that he has spent forty-one years of soldiering in
what used to be regarded as an unhealthy climate. He had carried into
late life the habit of martial exercise, and a Russian traveller has
left it on record that the sight which surprised him most in India was
to see the veteran commander of the army ride forth with his spear and
carry off the peg with the skill of a practised trooper. In his early
youth he had shown in the Mutiny that he possessed the fighting energy
of the soldier to a remarkable degree, but it was only in the Afghan War
of 1880 that he had an opportunity of proving that he had rarer and more
valuable gifts, the power of swift resolution and determined execution.
At the crisis of the war he and his army disappeared entirely from
the public ken only to emerge dramatically as victors at a point three
hundred miles distant from where they had vanished.

It is not only as a soldier, but as a man, that Lord Roberts possesses
some remarkable characteristics