ring line, and neither he nor any of his men
doubted that they could hold off the enemy for an indefinite time. In
the course of the afternoon reinforcements arrived for the Boers, but
Kitchener's Horse and a field battery came back and restored the balance
of power. In the evening the latter swayed altogether in favour of the
British, as Tucker appeared upon the scene with the whole of the 14th
Brigade; but as the question of an assault was being debated a positive
order arrived from Lord Roberts that the convoy should be abandoned and
the force return.

If Lord Roberts needed justification for this decision, the future
course of events will furnish it. One of Napoleon's maxims in war was to
concentrate all one's energies upon one thing at one time. Roberts's aim
was to outflank and possibly to capture Cronje's army. If he allowed
a brigade to be involved in a rearguard action, his whole swift-moving
plan of campaign might be dislocated. It was very annoying to lose a
hundred and eighty wagons, but it only meant a temporary inconvenience.
The plan of campaign was the essential thing. Therefore he sacrificed
his convoy and hurried his troops upon their original mission. It was
with heavy hearts and bitter words that those who had fought so long
abandoned their charge, but now at least there are probably few of them
who do not agree in the wisdom of the sacrifice. Our loss in this affair
was between fifty and sixty killed and wounded. The Boers were unable
to get rid of the stores, and they were eventually distributed among the
local farmers and recovered again as the British forces flowed over the
country. Another small disaster occurred to us on the preceding day in
the loss of fifty men of E company of Kitchener's Horse, which had been
left as a guard to a well in the desert.

But great events were coming to obscure those small checks which are
incidental to a war carried out over immense distances against a mobile
and enterprising enemy. Cronje had suddenly become aware of the net
which was closing round him. To the dark fierce man who had striven so
hard to make his line of kopjes impregnable it must have been a bitter
thing to abandon his trenches and his rifle pits. But he was crafty
as well as tenacious, and he had the Boer horror of being cut off--an
hereditary instinct from fathers who had fought on horseback against
enemies on foot. If at any time during the last ten weeks Methuen had
contained him in front w