"Oh! there may be some mistake about the thirty," the Boer said with a grim smile. "Still, you have certainly lost a great many more than we have; even at Belmont and Graspan, though you did turn us out of our kopjes, you lost at least five to our one."
"That may be true enough. But a force attacking across the open must always lose more than men who shoot them down from behind rocks, and who have their horses close by on which they can gallop away as soon as they find that they are getting the worst of it. If we ever get you in the open I fancy that your losses will be as heavy as ours."
"We should be fools if we let you," the Boer said. "We are too slim for that. We fight on our own ground."
"Yes; but if you invade Cape Colony, as you talk about, we shall be fighting on ground of our choosing, and you will find out the difference then."
Three days later Yorke started, with some fifteen other prisoners, one of whom was an officer, for Bloemfontein. They were placed in light carts and guarded by twenty Boers on horseback. The officer, who had been captured a fortnight before, said to Yorke after they had introduced themselves to each other:
"I am glad to meet someone who can give me a true account of what has taken place since I was captured. Of course I did not believe the Boer reports, but they were serious enough to make me feel very uneasy, for if there were any truth in them, even allowing for exaggeration, it certainly seemed that we must have been awfully cut up."
"The casualties have been heavy, but certainly not greater than would be expected, considering that the Boers held very strong positions, from which we turned them out three times. The fourth time, however, our attack failed. I can't tell you exactly the number of casualties, but I do not think altogether they exceeded one thousand six hundred, and of these nearly a thousand occurred in the last fight."
He then gave a full account of each battle.
"Thank you. It is bad enough that we have been stopped, and shall not be able to move again until reinforcements come up; still, it is not so bad as I feared. We certainly underrated the fighting power of the Boers; and the foreign engineer, who directs the making of their entrenchments, must be a very clever fellow, for that plan of making the trench well out in the plain in front of their kopjes was a capital one, and as far as I know quite new."