With one exception. Fritz W., the wounded German, lost his way and was unable to go back to town before the curfew-bell, the hour at which every resident was supposed to be indoors.
Finding himself near a small camp of soldiers in the vicinity of the Pretoria West Station, he cautiously crept into one of the tents, where he found a solitary soldier, sound asleep. Without a moment's hesitation, he stretched himself down on the ground beside him, thinking over the tragic events of that awful Sunday evening and dozing off at intervals, from sheer exhaustion of mind and body.
During the night another soldier, evidently returning from duty as guard or outpost, entered the tent and lay beside him on the other side.
So he spent the night between two British soldiers, and with the first approach of dawn he cautiously and stealthily extricated himself from his perilous position and made his way to town.
Three or four days after the perfidious betrayal of the Secret Service men the Committee was staggered with the tidings of the execution of their comrades, Krause and Venter, in the prison-yard of the old Pretoria jail.
The third, the nameless one, had, it was said, saved himself by turning King's evidence.
Of their last days on earth nothing will ever be known, but those of us blessed or cursed with the divine and cruel gift of imagination see in our mind's eye two men in prison-cells in solitary confinement, one a broken-hearted husband, the other the beloved son of a widowed mother.
Wounded and suffering they lie on their last bed of pain. Friendless and alone they await the untimely end of their brief but glorious career. Longing, with all the weakness of the human heart, for one last look of love, one reassuring clasp from a tender woman's hand, they prepare themselves to meet the death they have faced so often and so manfully in their heroic struggle for liberty and independence.
Fear? Despair?