During the evening the French military attaché, Captain D----, passed, and told us that Colonel de Villebois was only about an hour distant from us.
On March 9 we set out to join him. We found him with about fifty men, coming from Pretoria. These men were divided into two companies, the first under Breda, the second under me. Directly we arrived it was agreed to start at ten o'clock. We stopped long enough to add our cart to the Colonel's convoy, which we were to pick up near the farm of Abraham's Kraal. The 'French Corps' was formed!
About four o'clock we arrived on the height of Abraham's Kraal. The farm so-called lies along the Modder River, which flows from east to west. Its steep, bush-entangled banks are bathed with yellow, turbid water, whence its name--Modder (Mud) River. A line of kopjes, starting from the edge of the river, stretches several miles south of it. In front of them, to the west, lies a barren yellow plain. Far off on the horizon lie the kopjes of Poplar Grove, where we were forty-eight hours before.
The Colonel, who has gone off on a scouting expedition with his troop, is not to be found. We wait for him vainly all the evening with General Delarey's staff, in company with Baron von Wrangel, an ex-lieutenant of the German Guards. In this expedition a young volunteer named Franck, a quartermaster of the Chasseurs d'Afrique, whose term had just expired, distinguished himself by his coolness and his boldness under fire. He was a brave fellow, as he was to prove later on.
Night came on fast, our chief was still absent, and we went off to sleep at a little deserted farm, with the officers of the Johannesburg Politie. We lay down beside them and slept like men who have been in the saddle for twelve hours.
On March 10, at 5 a.m., we started for General Delarey's bivouac. It might have been 6.30, when Vecht-General Sellier passed us at a gallop, crying: 'Obsal! The English!'
Our positions, chosen the night before, were as follows: Our right, with the Modder River beyond, consisted of about 400 men of the Johannesburg Politie, with a Krupp gun, an Armstrong, and two Maxims. Then a space in the plain, where a commando of 200 men, with three cannon and a Maxim gun, constituting our centre, had taken up a position early in the morning. Finally, to the south, on our left, 300 men on a round kopje, fairly high.
At Poplar Grove two days before we had numbered several thousands; but the Boers, discouraged by the check they had undergone, had returned to their farms, refusing to fight. This was a proceeding very characteristic of these men, slow physically and morally, profoundly obstinate, astute rather than intelligent, distrustful, sometimes magnanimous. Easily depressed and as easily elated, without any apparent cause, they are a curious jumble of virtues and failings, often of the most contradictory kinds. The sort of panics frequent among them are due, I think, rather to their total lack of organization than to their temperament; for, not to speak of individual instances of valour, by no means rare among them, the Johannesburg Politie, with their very primitive discipline, have shown what might have been done by the Boers with some slight instruction and some slight discipline.[#]
[#] Ten years ago the Duc de Broglie, in his 'Marie-Thérèse Impératrice,' wrote as follows of the campaign of 1744 against Frederick the Great:
'Prince Charles had not even all his force at his disposal.... All that had been left him were the Hungarian levies, who had indeed been the main strength of the Austrian army; but these irregular troops, passing from ardour to discouragement with that mobility proper to men with whom enthusiasm does duty for experience and discipline, now thought of nothing but of a speedy return to their homesteads, and entered reluctantly upon every enterprise that retarded this return. Whole companies deserted the flag and took the road for Hungary.'