Before, therefore, the few that still remained in the huts and in the kraal could be forced to surrender, the burghers were ordered to retire. The hut where I was, was deserted.
Then my son said to me that it was time for us also, and asked whether I would follow him if he went out first. Yes. He thereupon led the way, and I followed him. But we could not get to our spider. The mules were unharnessed, and the vehicle moreover stood in the line of fire; but we were rescued from this difficulty. The cart of Mr. Christiaan de Beer stood ready inspanned, and whilst my son drove away with it, with Miss de Beer, who was wounded through the arm, I led Mrs. de Beer and her daughter out.
It was a brave deed was that done by our burghers at Graspan. From the bare ridge on the one side and the open plain on the other they had stormed the laager. Eventually they were firing at the enemy at such short range as from one Kaffir hut to the other, and were between the waggons often face to face with the troops. They consisted merely of the bodyguard of the President under Commandant Davel and those of General de Wet. There was also a small number of Transvaalers, who had accompanied General de la Rey on his journey to the President and the Chief-Commandant. Together they numbered between seventy and eighty men. But although fewer in number than the enemy, they had again given proof that it is not possible for 200 Englishmen to move five miles away from their cannon, and then to be met without disaster by a handful of our burghers. And this I say not because I wish to convey that the English are not brave. I have never seen greater courage than that displayed by them at Graspan. But it remains a fact that, as regards mobility and the handling of a rifle, they are no match for the Boers; and that when they have no cannon or have not the odds greatly in their favour, they must yield to the Boers. It is only by brute force that they could overpower us.
Dearly was Graspan paid for! Not only were the waggons that had escaped retaken by the reinforcement, but thirteen of our burghers were killed and about fourteen seriously wounded.
And what did the English say about the laager that they had taken? They said that it was a convoy of General de Wet. This is one of the cases of the untruthfulness of their reports. It was a women's laager and nothing else, with not a hundred men in it, of whom some were non-combatants and others very old men. There was not a single officer amongst them, to lead those who were armed; and so it came about that there was no resistance whatever when the laager was attacked.
I left the laager when the reinforcement approached, and went to Reitz. In the evening I left the town and got to the farm of Mr. Piet de Jager, near Rout Kop, at about ten o'clock, whence, however, the people had fled in fear of the advancing English.
The large force of the English now proceeded in the direction of Heilbron and Kroonstad; but first buried their and our dead at Reitz. Two days after, our burghers came and reburied our dead (thirteen bodies) there better than the enemy had in their haste been able to do.
Before closing this chapter I must still mention that the worst that had yet befallen us took place towards the middle of July. Other troops arrived, this time from Platrand Station, Transvaal, following the track of the columns that had already traversed the country. They destroyed over again what had already been destroyed. Large flocks of sheep were collected everywhere and stabbed to death at different centres, in heaps of thousands upon thousands. In the town of Vrede there was a great slaughter, and in order to make it impossible for our people to live there the dead sheep were carried into the houses and left to rot.
Not only in the districts of Vrede and Harrismith did this occur, but everywhere throughout the State. When I was in the neighbourhood of Senekal it took place there also. I have myself seen places where the skeletons of the sheep lay, and could hardly imagine anything sadder than to see them lying dead in heaps. The destroyers also frequently drove large herds of young horses or such as were unfit for service into kraals, or crowded them into ditches, and shot them there by tens, fifties, or hundreds, and the air was charged with pestilential odours. The troops completely destroyed the houses. Where the stables and waggon-houses were not burnt down, the dwelling-houses were devoted to the flames; and where these were not burnt down, they were so utterly ruined as to become wholly uninhabitable. The floors were broken up, the panes of glass smashed with the sashes and all, the doors broken to pieces, the doorposts and the window-sills torn out. And if it was not too terrible to permit of its being so described, one might say that the work of these men was sometimes childish—as, for instance, when on one occasion they hanged the cats in a barn, and on another shot a horse inside a house, and then covered it up with a table.
To escape from the troops the women sometimes took refuge in mountainous parts of the country in caves and grottos. Often they escaped; but on other occasions the soldiers discovered them in these places of refuge. An officer found two women with their children in a cave, and expressed himself very strongly as to what he saw there, saying that he would send a photograph of the scene to the Graphic, as if the picture of such misery could do credit to himself and his nation! He wrote the following letter, and handed it to one of the women to deliver to her husband:—