Guns Captured at Paardeberg.
Photo by Alf. S. Hosking, Cape Town.
Plentiful rain had fallen, saturating humanity, and causing the heated ground to retract the fumes of a charnel-house. But in one way better times had come. There was fuller fare. Large convoys made a daily appearance, and the men were refreshed after their labours with the promise of plenty. Food of a substantial kind was indeed necessary, for it served to attune the stomach to the noxious vapours that hourly grew almost tangible. Cronje, though he knew it not, was sowing the seeds of a harvest of revenge! He was killing his thousands! For many days our troops had been enduring lenten fare; they had rung the changes on hardships, fatigues, and self-abnegations of all kinds. They had been battered on by storms. They had outstripped transport and supplies. They had kept the inner man appeased and working on quarter rations. They had marched like giants in ten-league boots, and meanwhile fed like fairies; yet withal had borne countenances cheery and noble, full of confidence and unquenchable pluck. But these splendid creatures were but mortal. The foul fiends of enteric and malaria were already sapping their buoyant constitutions, and marking them, one after another, with the deadly seal of possession.
Every day of the Dutchman’s resistance was therefore full of horror, full of anxiety. There were continual rumours that the Boer reinforcements were in view, that the Federals were massing for a desperate effort. Wearied and battered, the cavalry at Koodoosrand were perpetually speeding on wild-goose chases, in one of which both General French and Colonel Haig nearly lost their lives. A reconnaissance in force had been ordered. The drift, swollen by rains, was now a torrent, and in crossing the General and his A.D.C. were thrown by their restive horses into the river, whence they only emerged safe and sound in consequence of their being fine swimmers and pneumonia-proof Britons.
Cronje, finding that the reinforcements failed to reach him, decided on the night of the 26th to cut his way out and seize a kopje before dawn. But his intention was frustrated by the Mounted Infantry, who, in spite of the darkness, kept a watchful eye on the slippery enemy.
Quite early on the morning of the 27th of February, the anniversary of Majuba day, the splutter of musketry greeted the ears of the dozing camp. Some one was up and doing early. It was the Canadians. They were acting on the principle of the early bird that catches the morning worm. Supported by the Gordons, Cornwalls, and Shropshires, they were advancing, building a trench in the very teeth of the enemy, and at fifty yards’ range were saluting him with such deadly warmth as to render his position untenable. How this energetic and gallant movement, the wonder and admiration of all, was brought about was described by the correspondent of the Times. “It appeared that Brigadier-General MacDonald sent from his bed a note to Lord Roberts, reminding him that Tuesday was the anniversary of that disaster which, we all remembered, he had by example, order, and threat himself done his best to avert, even while the panic had been at its height; Sir Henry Colvile submitted a suggested attack backed by the same unanswerable plea. For a moment Lord Roberts demurred to the plan; it seemed likely to cost too heavily, but the insistance of Canada broke down his reluctance, and the men of the oldest colony were sent out in the small hours of Tuesday morning to redeem the blot on the name of the mother-country.
“From the existing trench, some 700 yards long, on the northern bank, held jointly by the Gordons and the Canadians, the latter were ordered to advance in two lines—each, of course, in extended order—thirty yards apart, the first with bayonets fixed, the second reinforced by fifty Royal Engineers under Colonel Kincaid and Captain Boileau.
“In dead silence, and covered by a darkness only faintly illuminated by the merest rim of the dying moon, ‘with the old moon in her lap,’ the three companies of Canadians moved on over the bush-strewn ground. For over 400 yards the noiseless advance continued, and when within eighty yards of the Boer trench the trampling of the scrub betrayed the movement. Instantly the outer trench of the Boers burst into fire, which was kept up almost without intermission from five minutes to three o’clock to ten minutes past the hour. Under this fire the courage and discipline of the Canadians proved themselves. Flinging themselves on the ground, they kept up an incessant fire on the trenches, guided only by the flashes of their enemy’s rifles; and the Boers admit that they quickly reduced them to the necessity of lifting their rifles over their heads to the edge of the earthwork and pulling their triggers at random. Behind this line the Engineers did magnificent work; careless of danger, the trench was dug from the inner edge of the bank to the crest, and then for fifty or sixty yards out through the scrub. The Canadians retired three yards to this protection and waited for dawn, confident in their new position, which had entered the protected angle of the Boer position, and commanded alike the rifle-pits of the banks and the trefoil-shaped embrasures on the north.”
For some time it seemed as though hostilities were suspended, and then—a sign, a flutter of white, a signal of surrender caught the straining eyes of the regiment nearest the crest of the hill. In an instant the plains and the hollows, the kopjes, and even the dome of heaven, seemed animated—lending themselves to repeat the ringing cheer, to reiterate the cry of an immense joyous heart splitting a little universe in twain. Ears languid, ears hard-working, ears occupied, ears expectant, all caught the sound, echoed it and knew that at last the looked-for hour had come, Cronje had surrendered! Many Boers threw up their hands and dashed unarmed across the intervening space; others waved white flags and exposed themselves carelessly on their entrenchments, but not a shot was fired. Colonel Otter and Colonel Kincaid held a hasty consultation, which was disturbed by the sight of Sir Henry Colvile (commanding the Ninth Division) quietly riding down within 500 yards of the northern Boer trenches to bring the news that at that very moment a horseman was hurrying in with a white flag and Cronje’s unconditional surrender, to take effect at sunrise.