Soon after the 5th regiment of mounted infantry had refitted at Kroonstad important news reached them: De Wet had recovered from his losses at Bothaville, and had appeared in the south-east of the Free State, where he was attacking Dewetsdorp, whose defenders were hard pressed. The regiment was sent off by rail to Edenburg, where it joined the relieving column, which unfortunately did not arrive in time to prevent the surrender of the garrison. The company for the next two months marched almost incessantly in the eastern half of the Free State, chasing De Wet, who, like the rainbow, was always “in the next field.” They had a couple of days’ rest at Christmas, when they bivouacked at a farm near Ficksburg, where, according to the diary of one of the officers, “the only liquid available for our dinner was of so substantial a nature that a mugful evaporated would leave enough solid matter to make a good-sized brick! We shared the only dam in the place with the horses, mules, and oxen. Tea was an impossibility, and the coffee we swallowed with our eyes shut.” Towards the end of January, 1901, it was discovered that De Wet was secretly concentrating his burghers for another attempt to raid into Cape Colony. Many columns, including that in which the 5th M.I. were serving, were directed against him and caught up his rear-guard at the Tabaksberg, where on the 29th of January the Boers fought a delaying action, in the course of which a handful of the Royal Irish earned praise first for their dash in “rushing” a kopje, and then for holding it against very heavy odds. The 5th were now ordered to Bloemfontein, and after a slow railway journey detrained at Bethulie to take part in the movements by which De Wet and his guerilla bands were to be expelled from Cape Colony. They were sent off to the north-west, and so hard was the marching that when the Royal Irish company reached Hopetown at the end of February, it had lost sixty out of the eighty horses it possessed a month before. In the course of the trek Private Maher again came to the fore by volunteering to cross a drift, in order to ascertain if the farther bank of the river was occupied by the enemy.
From Hopetown the company worked its way back to the east of the Free State, on one occasion bivouacking near Ramah, where it had smelt powder for the first time, on another halting at Hout Nek, where under Hamilton it had fought at the beginning of May, 1900. During the remainder of the war the 5th regiment of mounted infantry was chiefly employed in patrolling, escorting convoys, and clearing farms, duties which entailed incessant and monotonous work. The process of clearing a farm of food and forage was by no means easy, especially when it had to be done very quickly by a flank-guard under stringent orders to keep its proper place in the column. After a harassing day’s work, an officer in the regiment wrote in his diary that “to tell a flank-guard to clear farms on its march is all very well in theory, but when it comes to getting sacks of wheat or tons of loose mealies [i.e., Indian corn] out of a back room through several narrow doors or narrower windows, the flank-guard often finds itself left behind the rear-guard. Some people seem to think that in clearing a farm you have only to blow a whistle, and all the animals commit suicide and all the grain jumps into the nearest dam.” It must not be imagined that these duties were carried on unopposed. There were frequent skirmishes; in one of these affairs (October 17, 1901) a detachment of the Royal Irish company, finding itself surrounded by an overwhelming force of burghers in a place from which there was no possibility of fighting its way out, was compelled to lay down its arms after the officer in command and three soldiers had been wounded.
The British losses in South Africa were by no means heavy, considering that the war lasted two years and eight months, and that during a great part of the time more than a quarter of a million of troops were in the field. The casualties were—
| Officers (exclusive of staff). | Other ranks. | Total. | |
| Killed | 518 | 5,256 | 5,774 |
| Died of wounds, disease, or from accident | 554 | 15,614 | 16,168 |
| Wounded | 1851 | 20,978 | 22,829 |
The casualties in the Royal Irish regiment were as follows:[328]—
Officers—
| Killed | Captains S. G. French, W. Gloster, and F. L. Fosbery. |
| Died of wounds | Captains J. B. S. Alderson, R. R. Arbuthnot, and Sir John Power, Bart. (5th battalion). |
| Died of disease | Captain G. A. Ashfordby-Trenchard (5th battalion) and 2nd Lieutenant A. C. S. Fletcher. |
| Wounded | Majors H. M. Hatchell and B. J. C. Doran; Captains E. F. Milner, R. A. Smyth, and T. Warwick-Williams (volunteer company); Lieutenants M. H. E. Welch and J. A. M. J. P. Kelly. |
| Severely injured | Captain G. Hearn (4th battalion). |
Other ranks—