Three Years' War

by Christiaan Rudolf De Wet

I had given orders that all the cattle along the railway line should be removed; General Louis Botha had made the same regulation in regard to the country round Pretoria and Johannesburg. If only our orders had been carried out a little more strictly, and if only the most elementary rules of strategy had been observed in our efforts to break the English lines of communication, Lord Roberts and his thousands of troops in Pretoria would have found themselves in the same plight as the Samaritans in Samaria—they would have perished of hunger. It was not their Commander-in-Chief's skill that saved them, not his habit of taking into account all possible eventualities—no, they had to thank the disobedience of our burghers for the fact that they were not all starved to death in Pretoria.

I arranged with General Froneman that he should cross the line at the point I had already selected, that is to say, north of Rhenoster River bridge, and that in the morning he should attack, from the eastern side, the English who were posted at Leeuwspruit Bridge. I, in the meanwhile, would make my way with a Krupp to the west side of the line, and having found a place of concealment near Roodepoort, would be ready to fall upon the English as soon as I heard that the other party had opened fire on them from the east.

But my plan was to come to nothing. For when, during the night, Froneman reached the line, a skirmish took place then and there with the English outposts at Leeuwspruit railway bridge. At the same time a train arrived from the south, on which the burghers opened such a fierce fire that it was speedily brought to a standstill. General Froneman at once gave orders to storm the train, but his men did not carry out his orders.

Had they done so, Lord Kitchener would have fallen into our hands!

Nobody knew that he was in the train, and it was only later that we heard how, when the train stopped, he got a horse out of one of the waggons, mounted it, and disappeared into the darkness of the night.

Shortly afterwards the train moved on again, and our great opportunity was gone!

General Froneman succeeded in overpowering the garrison at the railway bridge, and took fifty-eight prisoners. He then set fire to the bridge, which was a temporary wooden structure, having been built to replace another similar one, which had been blown up with gunpowder.

Three hundred Kaffirs were also made prisoners on this occasion. They protested that they had no arms, and had only been employed in work upon the railway line. This absence of rifles was their saving. Possibly they had really been in possession of arms, and had thrown them away under cover of the darkness; but the burghers could not know this, and therefore acted upon the principle that it is better to let ten culprits escape than to condemn an innocent man to death.

General Froneman went on towards the east of Doorndraai. He was very well satisfied with his bridge-burning and his capture of prisoners, and in his satisfaction he never gave thought to me.

I waited in my hiding-place, expecting that, as we had agreed, the firing would begin from the east, but nothing happened. I did not care to make an attack on my own account from the west, for my positions were not practicable for the purpose, and being short of men, I feared that such an attempt might end in disaster.