stlessly inward and onward. Hunter broke through with small loss, for
the force which should have checked him at Retief's Nek was waiting at
Commando Nek for Rundle and the Eighth Division. It was a master stroke,
for when once Hunter was upon the inside of the valley he was in a position
to threaten the rear of the Boer forces at Commando Nek, and that was a
state of affairs which the enemy could not stand upon any terms. A number
of them, under clever Commandant Olivier, slipped away through Golden Gate.
They did not face the more open country even inside the big valley, but
made their way through a piece of ground known as Witzies Hoek, and thence
through a ravine which almost beggars description. Later on I went with
Driscoll's Scouts in search of the tracks of these men, and followed along
the same road they had taken. The ravine was a long, narrow gap between
mountain ranges of immense height. The sides of the mountains were covered
with loose boulders, sufficient to protect the whole Boer army from our
artillery fire. The only track which a horseman could possibly follow wound
in and out alongside the face of the cliffs, so narrow that even the horses
bred in the country found it difficult to keep their feet upon it, and
could only proceed, at funeral pace, in single file. A handful of men could
have held that place against an army. With De Wet and Olivier gone, half
our task was over. The Boers made a blind rush, first to one nek, then to
the next, only to find that Britain's sons guarded them all. Small bodies
of men might escape, but the vast supplies of mealies, waggons, guns, and
all the cumbrous appliances of war, without which an army is useless, were
penned in. The hand of the Field-Marshal was on them. The blocking forces
held the neks, and now those forces which had to strike were ordered to
move. No sooner did General Rundle receive his orders to advance than he
rolled forward with the impetuosity of a storm breaking upon a southern
coast. They on the spot knew that all the enemy's hopes lay centred round a
town in the middle of the valley. This town was Fouriesburg. The general
who could strike that town first would deal the death blow to the Boer
forces in the Free State. Rundle was furthest from the town; the pathway
his troops would have to pursue was rougher and more rugged than that which
lay open to the rest of the forces.

But Rundle knew his men; he knew their mettle; he had tried them with long,