knowledge that in
their desperate situation there was more comfort and safety in numbers.
The war seemed to be swiftly approaching its close. On the 15th Buller
occupied Spitzkop in the north, capturing a quantity of stores, while on
the 14th French took Barberton in the south, releasing all the remaining
British prisoners and taking possession of forty locomotives, which do
not appear to have been injured by the enemy. Meanwhile Pole-Carew had
worked along the railway line, and had occupied Kaapmuiden, which was
the junction where the Barberton line joins that to Lourenco Marques.
Ian Hamilton's force, after the taking of Lydenburg and the action which
followed, turned back, leaving Buller to go his own way, and reached
Komatipoort on September 24th, having marched since September 9th
without a halt through a most difficult country.

On September 11th an incident had occurred which must have shown the
most credulous believer in Boer prowess that their cause was indeed
lost. On that date Paul Kruger, a refugee from the country which he had
ruined, arrived at Lourenco Marques, abandoning his beaten commandos
and his deluded burghers. How much had happened since those distant days
when as a little herdsboy he had walked behind the bullocks on the great
northward trek. How piteous this ending to all his strivings and his
plottings! A life which might have closed amid the reverence of a
nation and the admiration of the world was destined to finish in exile,
impotent and undignified. Strange thoughts must have come to him during
those hours of flight, memories of his virile and turbulent youth, of
the first settlement of those great lands, of wild wars where his
hand was heavy upon the natives, of the triumphant days of the war
of independence, when England seemed to recoil from the rifles of the
burghers. And then the years of prosperity, the years when the simple
farmer found himself among the great ones of the earth, his name a
household word in Europe, his State rich and powerful, his coffers
filled with the spoil of the poor drudges who worked so hard and paid
taxes so readily. Those were his great days, the days when he hardened
his heart against their appeals for justice and looked beyond his own
borders to his kinsmen in the hope of a South Africa which should be
all his own. And now what had come of it all? A handful of faithful
attendants, and a fugitive old man, clutching in his flight at his
papers and his money