es, and alas for
the wasted efforts of gallant men! Olifant's Nek had been abandoned and
De Wet had passed safely through it into the plains beyond, where De
la Rey's force was still in possession. In vain Methuen's weary column
forced the Magato Pass and descended into Rustenburg. The enemy was in a
safe country once more. Whose the fault, or whether there was a fault at
all, it is for the future to determine. At least unalloyed praise can
be given to the Boer leader for the admirable way in which he had
extricated himself from so many dangers. On the 17th., moving along
the northern side of the mountains, he appeared at Commando Nek on the
Little Crocodile River, where he summoned Baden-Powell to surrender, and
received some chaff in reply from that light-hearted commander. Then,
swinging to the eastward, he endeavoured to cross to the north of
Pretoria. On the 19th he was heard of at Hebron. Baden-Powell and Paget
had, however, already barred this path, and De Wet, having sent Steyn on
with a small escort, turned back to the Free State. On the 22nd it was
reported that, with only a handful of his followers, he had crossed
the Magaliesberg range by a bridlepath and was riding southwards. Lord
Roberts was at last free to turn his undivided attention upon Botha.

Two Boer plots had been discovered during the first half of August,
the one in Pretoria and the other in Johannesburg, each having for its
object a rising against the British in the town. Of these the former,
which was the more serious, involving as it did the kidnapping of Lord
Roberts, was broken up by the arrest of the deviser, Hans Cordua,
a German lieutenant in the Transvaal Artillery. On its merits it is
unlikely that the crime would have been met by the extreme penalty,
especially as it was a question whether the agent provocateur had
not played a part. But the repeated breaches of parole, by which our
prisoners of one day were in the field against us on the next, called
imperatively for an example, and it was probably rather for his broken
faith than for his hare-brained scheme that Cordua died. At the
same time it is impossible not to feel sorrow for this idealist of
twenty-three who died for a cause which was not his own. He was shot in
the garden of Pretoria Gaol upon August 24th. A fresh and more stringent
proclamation from Lord Roberts showed that the British Commander was
losing his patience in the face of the wholesale return of paroled
men to th