The Carbineers had attacked the men of Field-Cornet de Beer on a ridge, and bombarded them with a Maxim. Our burghers held their ground until Field-Cornet Lyon arrived with a reinforcement and charged the Carbineers on their right wing. The English could not resist this onslaught and betook themselves to flight, never resting until they arrived out of breath at Ladysmith. One of their officers, Lieutenant Galway, was taken prisoner, and sent to Harrismith. The camp of the Carbineers also fell into our hands, and the burghers were immensely pleased with the little light green tents they found. These were very portable, and went far and wide with the burghers in later stages of the war.
After addressing the Winburg men, I had returned to Harrismith on the morning of the 18th, and was an eye-witness of the intense excitement of the town during the next few days, when news of battles fought in the north of Natal arrived. We heard of the fight at Glencoe on the 20th October, at Elandslaagte on the 21st, and at Rietfontein (Modderspruit) on the 24th. In the first two the Transvaalers had been engaged, in the last the Free Staters.
I was very strongly affected, and felt after the news of Rietfontein came that I could not remain at Harrismith. I therefore decided to go to Natal without delay and join the Harrismith Commando. On Friday the 27th October I took leave of my wife and children, and arrived in the afternoon at the headquarters of General Marthinus Prinsloo. He was very kind, and provided a cart for my journey and that of Dr. Cilliers who also wished to go into Natal. Next day I arrived at Bester's Station, and had the opportunity of visiting the burghers who had been wounded in the fight at Rietfontein. I was especially glad to see Mr. Jacobus de Jager of Loskop. As he was temporarily hors de combat, he offered me a horse and his own saddle for a time. I was of course very grateful and accepted his offer with alacrity.
After breakfast, next morning, I set out with the object of finding the Harrismith Commando, and soon came to Smith's Crossing. There I saw what a farm looked like where looting had taken place. Some of our burghers had destroyed everything there that was not firmly built on, or planted in the ground. The windows were smashed, the doors torn off, and everything that was of value or use was carried away. Presses and chests of drawers had been broken open, furniture dashed to pieces, pillows and mattresses cut open, and everywhere about there were lying scattered in dreadful confusion, feathers of pillows and beds, pieces of furniture, torn books, photographs, plates, pots, pans, even articles of female attire.
The sight of this affected me very unfavourably, as I found it did many others too. Several remarked that we were not fighting for booty, but for the sacred cause of our independence. But the foreigners fighting among us against England laughed at our scruples. Destruction of property, they said, was a part of the war, and England would destroy our farms worse when once she began.
None of us would believe this assertion of the foreigners then. We know now how true it was. It is nearly three years now since I looked at the destruction at Smith's Crossing, and what have I not seen since of the destruction carried out by England? Everything done by the Boers is as dust in the balance, when compared with the devastation carried out by the British soldiers.
Now English officers, when taxed with the barbarity with which they devastated the farms in the two Republics, have been accustomed to retort that it was we who began the game. To this it can be replied that the Boers destroyed the houses of those only who had fled from their farms, and had thus shown that they were hostile to us; that even this was not done by order of the Boer Generals, nay, was done contrary to the express orders forbidding the destruction of farms, and that it was never carried out so ruthlessly as it was later by the English troops. The houses were never committed to the flames by the Boers, nor did they blow up any farmstead with dynamite. But the steadings in the Free State and Transvaal were destroyed by fire or dynamite by order of a British Field-Marshal, and later of a British Commander-in-Chief. And there were hundreds of cases where this took place over the heads of women and children, who were immediately after the destruction exposed to the wet weather in summer and the cold of winter. Nothing approaching such barbarity was ever done by the Boers. If, therefore, the English were making reprisals in burning the farms, they avenged themselves not as Cain seven times, but as Lamech seventy times seven.
I did not have to go far from Smith's Crossing. I found the Harrismith burghers three miles to the west of Ladysmith, near the homestead of Mr. Gert Potgieter. They consisted of what was called a horse-commando, they were encumbered with no convoy, and only two or three waggons (one of them carrying ammunition) stood about. The difference between the camp here and the great laagers on the Drakensberg, with their walls of encircling waggons, struck me. Here there was nothing besides the little brown canvas Free State tents, and the beautiful little green tents taken from the Carbineers on the 18th. One would be much in want of many things, I thought, in a horse-commando, and life in it would be in the utmost degree repulsive, to a person especially with studious predilections, to whom the four walls of a study were more attractive than the wide, wide plains under the great blue vault above. I thought so then, but the time was coming when we should not have even little Carbineer tents.
However inhospitable a "horse-commando" appeared, the burghers were not so. They were mostly members of my congregation, and received me with the utmost cordiality. They gave me something to eat—just what they had ready—Kaboemielies, (boiled maize). What better—what more nutritious food could they have given me than mealies? Many a Boer poet has sung the praises of the mealies, but the inspiration of each has failed.
The day after I arrived in the laager, the 30th October, the battle of Nicholson's Nek was fought. It was in this fight that Christian de Wet made his first appearance. He was then an acting Commandant, and led about 200 men up the hill, where he captured 800 British troops. The Transvaal burghers were also engaged that day and took 400 soldiers prisoners, so that we captured 1200 in all. I was not present. I only saw from a great distance our shells exploding on the battlefield, and I can therefore give no description of what took place.