The troopers had each little else but dry biscuit, the officers faring hardly any better.
Another correspondent writes of this affair:
We had a very pretty fight at the Zand River, and were within an ace of taking two of the enemy’s big guns. To begin at the beginning. We had marched the previous day from our camp near Smaldeel to within about five miles of the Zand River. On our arrival there we heard that the Australians and Oxfords had been having a skirmish with some Boers at the bridge, and had seized a train of stores, but were forced to retire. Starting at daybreak in the second line of Mounted Infantry, we got across the drift all right, and drove the Boer outposts back. We sat on the further side of the river for about an hour, watching them bring up two big guns on to a kopje about three miles off, and wondering when we should be shelled. Presently we were ordered off on a flank movement, and after trotting some miles came in touch with the enemy. We dismounted, and moved up a valley with good cover, the pom-poms following. They drove back the Boer riflemen and presently silenced a gun, which had been amusing itself by shelling our led horses, but luckily without effect. We mounted again and started for a two-mile gallop to get up with their gun, but it had disappeared. Making a flank movement round the shoulder of the position they had occupied, and pushing on some distance, we found them again, or rather they found us first. Their gun got our range beautifully, but every shell seemed to fall and burst between the horses. Of course we were widely extended. Retiring, we dismounted and then advanced on foot, but their rifle fire and shell fire was too hot; so again we tried to out-flank their position. A Company and half of B Company advanced, and we climbed a small kopje with a deserted Kaffir kraal on top; Loch’s Horse, some of the Australians, and the West Riding Mounted Infantry went round and took up a position further along the ridge. We sat there for nearly two hours under a terrific shell fire, till it dawned on us to move below the brow. For the first half-hour they landed shell after shell (40-pounders) right into the middle of us; luckily, very few burst properly. If they had fired shrapnel, which bursts in the air, or lyddite, we should all have been blown off the top. They then let our horses have a few shots, and killed two and wounded three. In the meantime urgent messages were being sent for our artillery, or at least the pom-poms that generally come with us, but unfortunately they could get nothing but a walk out of their horses, and the Boers quietly trekked away. We ought to have had them with the greatest of ease, as we were well round them on two sides and a brigade was moving somewhere on the third. If the Artillery had got up in time we could easily have moved round the fourth side. We tried to keep in touch with the Boers when they retired, but it soon got dark and we had to stop.
No stirring episodes or dramatic incidents marked the army’s farther advance towards a stronghold which the Free State Boers had declared that they would defend to the last. Colonel Lumsden deals with this part of the operations briefly in the following notes:
Dawn on the 10th saw us in the saddle again on the move for Kroonstad. The leading sections were constantly in touch with the enemy, and sometimes under heavy shell fire, from which Corporal Kirwan received a scalp wound not very serious. After a long and weary march we halted at nightfall near a farm, where we were lucky enough to get some Indian corn for the horses and a few sheep for the men.
We made an early start on the 11th for the expected big fight at Kroonstad, it having been reported on the previous evening that the enemy were strongly posted five miles on our side of the town.
We advanced for ten miles with the utmost military precaution, only to find that the enemy had vacated the position, leaving Kroonstad undefended. Lord Roberts marched in at 3 P.M., followed by the Guards and the rest of the Infantry, the mounted troops flanking both sides of the town. We occupied heights on the left, and halted there for the night, changing ground next morning to our present camping ground, a mile distant, where, with the rest of the army, we are waiting for supplies for horses and men, before a forward movement towards Pretoria can be made.
The halt has been a welcome one, as our horses are fairly done, and I doubt if I could mount 150 men to-morrow, and a few more weeks’ work like that of the last would reduce the numbers to 100. We are leaving a dozen horses to-day as unfit to march, and shot six yesterday. Cast horses wander about all over the veldt and lie dead in the river or any other quiet place, and fatigue parties are ceaselessly at work burying the bodies.
You can form no idea of the condition of our horses, and, but for the fact that we have been able to commandeer and get remounts en route, we should have half our corps dismounted. We have lost quite seventy-five horses already. I have stated officially that we require immediately seventy-five remounts more, and these we expect to get this afternoon. Mrs. Barrow’s ‘Molly Riley’ looks like a bathing-machine horse, and I fear is on her last march.
The men are all very well and in good spirits, are most efficient cooks, and if allowed would rank high as looters; but orders against this are very strict, and our men pay liberally for anything in the shape of foodstuffs wherever procurable.