It was an incredibly stupid accident. Deneys Reitz had been on commando for a year and a half; he’d often been under fire, but never harmed. A few days earlier, on 3 April, they had sat down to dinner to celebrate his nineteenth birthday, when he had yet another narrow escape. A surprise attack by the British. Shrouded in mist, the Boer fighters had managed to slip away from the column, trotting alongside their oxen. And now this. All they were doing was building a campfire. Trying to smash a log for fuel, he had thrown a large stone at it. The wood was hard and resilient, and the stone ricocheted ‘like a shot from a catapult’ and struck his right leg. He had an open wound, which exposed the fractured shin bone. Fortunately, one of his comrades was able to help him, and the British left them in peace for a while.
But he wasn’t having much luck. Shortly before the accident 200 wild horses had been delivered from the Orange Free State. To share them among 300 men, De la Rey decided to raffle them. Reitz’s companions hadn’t done badly; nine of the 12 Rustenburg men had won a new horse, but he had drawn a blank. His only solace was the pleasure of watching the horses being broken in.
A few weeks later, Reitz was hobbling around the laager with his leg in a splint. He still had no horse. Winter was approaching, no more horses would be brought in, and he was afraid of becoming ‘a permanent camp dweller’. His fortunes changed. One morning, a group of Germans led by Field Cornet Mayer arrived at the camp. They had a few spare horses; Reitz was there like a shot. If he wanted to join them, they would give him a small grey mare. His leg hadn’t healed completely, but he agreed without a moment’s hesitation. An opportunity like this wouldn’t come his way again. He took leave of his comrades and set off with the Germans, in search of De la Rey.
The going was worse than he had expected. His leg throbbed and ached with every step the horse took, and the weather had taken a turn for the worse. It hadn’t troubled him in the shelter of the laager, but out here, on the plains, they were exposed to the bitter cold, to piercing winds and suffocating clouds of dust. At night he lay shivering under a threadbare blanket, listening to the crackle of ice in the pools.
Three days later they met De la Rey’s commandos at Hartbeespoort. There was also a large British force in the area and an encounter was inevitable. Reitz didn’t take part. De la Rey had come by while one of the Germans was attending to his leg. On seeing it, he had sent Reitz to the field hospital, which had been set up in a deserted farmhouse. The doctor, a young Dutchman, prescribed a few days’ rest. One morning, Reitz was awoken by the sound of gunfire. The British were approaching, and even the sick and wounded were forced to flee. He rejoined the Germans, but it didn’t come to a serious clash. The Boers were too heavily outnumbered and decided to withdraw.
De la Rey seemed unconcerned. In the afternoon he called a halt in a wood, and addressed his men. Dry humour with a serious undertone, that was his style, and it worked like a charm. There wasn’t a murmur when he announced that they would have to ride through the night. Even Reitz could cope. The rest had done him good and his leg was not as painful. It was a clear night, affording a good view of a comet that had been visible in the sky for some time. Its tail was in the form of the letter V. The prophet Van Rensburg was explaining that it stood for vrede, the Afrikaans word for peace, when suddenly, a voice called out of the dark: No, Mr van Rensburg, ‘it means Vlug [retreat].’ The night was filled with half-suppressed chuckles. The oracle said no more.64
Flee again or settle for peace? Neither Botha nor the other Transvaal leaders had made up their minds. They had rejected Kitchener’s proposals out of hand, but in their hearts they were still troubled. The situation seemed to be deteriorating by the day, winter was setting in, and they had no idea whether they could still expect anything of Europe. They hadn’t heard from Kruger, officially still their president, since his departure in September 1900. Nor had there been news from the delegation or from Leyds. By the same token, they probably had no idea what was happening in the Transvaal. They kept sending couriers to Lourenço Marques, but they had presumably been intercepted. In any event, none had returned. They had to find some other way to communicate.
Desperate times called for desperate measures. On 14 March 1901 Botha sent for Johan Bierens de Haan, the surgeon and head of the first Dutch ambulance.65 The two men met in Ermelo, where Botha made an astonishing request, the more so considering the shortage of physicians in the field. Would Bierens de Haan be willing to return to the Netherlands? It was vital for President Kruger to be informed about the situation, and the Red Cross doctor would not only be a trustworthy emissary, but also above suspicion. Bierens de Haan was reluctant to abandon the sick and wounded Boer fighters, but Botha managed to convince him that the mission was of paramount importance.
To ensure that the Red Cross was not compromised, he wouldn’t take any documents with him. He was given a briefing by Botha, Burger and Reitz and access to confidential information in the war files, which had been unearthed for his benefit. On that basis he compiled a summary of the relevant facts, committed them to memory and burned his papers before reaching the British front. On arrival in Lourenço Marques, on 24 April, he wrote it all out again so as to convey the information to Kruger and the others as accurately as possible.
It was a depressing account. The Boers were running out of weapons, ammunition, food, clothing, horses, money, everything. Could supplies be sent from Europe, through German South West Africa perhaps? Moreover, there were 20,000 men, at most, who were still carrying arms, two-thirds in the Transvaal and a third in the Orange Free State. The black population was becoming increasingly hostile towards the commandos and more threatening towards their women and children. The British were strengthening their reinforcements, particularly around the railways, and deploying more coloureds and Africans as scouts and guards. They were arming them as well. The Boer fighters were ‘disconsolate’ about the plight of their families. They were either abandoned among the ruins of their farms, with no means of subsistence, or transported in open trucks to camps where they were mistreated by the hensoppers and deprived of food and drink. Many children were dying. Could they send emergency relief from Europe? With winter around the corner, Burger, Reitz and Botha were ‘pessimistic about the future’. They were still intending to ‘keep up the fight to the end’, but if nothing changed, they would probably be ‘compelled to lay down their arms’.66
Botha wisely kept this conclusion to himself when he finally met Christiaan de Wet again, in late March 1901. They had arranged to meet in Vrede, in the northern Orange Free State, to reconcile their differences and restore a basis of trust. Both had some explaining to do: De Wet about his unauthorised incursions into the Cape Colony, Botha about his unilateral decision to negotiate with Kitchener. Both of those projects had led nowhere. They would do better working together. In any event, this was the understanding on which the military leaders of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State parted company: continue the struggle.67
But winter set in. There was no change for the better. April passed. Bierens de Haan had only recently left the country. The Transvaal leaders were again overcome with despair. On 10 May 1901 they held a military council meeting on a farm called De Emigratie, near Ermelo. Besides Burger, Reitz and Botha, it was attended by generals Smuts, Ben Viljoen and Chris Botha. They reached a unanimous decision. Now they needed to hear what Kruger thought of it. They assumed that the British wouldn’t allow Bierens de Haan to return, in which case they would ask Kitchener, as a favour, to allow them to send official envoys back and forth. If he refused, they would request a ceasefire in order to discuss the situation with their people.
The proposal had far-reaching implications which, this time, they did discuss with their allies. Reitz wrote a letter to the Orange Free State government that same day, listing five reasons to support his case. The first two were about the loss of men and matériel. Burghers were defecting in droves, and soon there would be none left. Their supply of weapons was virtually depleted. The remaining three reasons were to do with morale. The government was losing its authority, the leaders their personal influence, and the people their trust. They couldn’t ‘allow things to continue as they are’. It was time ‘to take decisive measures’.
President Steyn agreed, but drew a different conclusion. He had been confronted with the Transvalers’ indecisiveness before—first on 1 June 1900, the day before the fall of Pretoria—and it usually threw him into a rage,68 as it did now. On 15 May he sent two letters in reply, an official one to Reitz and a personal note to Smuts, venting his indignation. Shortages of everything, weapons, food, you name it, they had that in the Orange Free State as well; ‘apathy among burghers and officers’, too. But give up the struggle? The cause they had espoused for the sake of the Transvaal? Never. If the Transvalers were to desert the Free Staters and the rebels in the Cape and Natal, it would be the end of the Afrikaner nation. For the nation to survive, ‘we must demonstrate that now through our perseverance and strength to fight and suffer’.69
This time, Steyn’s withering reply wasn’t enough to sway the Transvaal leaders. They stubbornly persisted in their plan to contact Kruger, but by other means, by sending telegrams instead of emissaries. For that, too, they needed Kitchener’s consent, and again they used a Dutch intermediary.
On 22 May 1901 the consul-general of the Netherlands, F.J. Domela Nieuwenhuis, was summoned to Melrose House. British headquarters had received a request from Botha for permission to use the Dutch cipher code to communicate with Kruger by telegram. Kitchener had consented. If the Dutch consul-general agreed, the idea was to collect the telegram in Standerton, a town in the south-eastern Transvaal, between the Vaal and the railway line to Natal. Domela Nieuwenhuis thought the procedure unnecessarily complicated—couldn’t Botha’s representatives come to Pretoria?—but in the end he consented. On 26 May he took the train to Standerton, accompanied by the vice-consul, A.D Roosegaarde Bisschop. The Boer representatives hadn’t yet arrived, so Domela Nieuwenhuis returned, leaving his vice-consul to wait for them. Smuts only got there on 1 June, accompanied by a secretary, both of them blindfolded. Roosegaarde Bisschop received the telegram for Kruger from them and returned to Pretoria a day later. He translated the text into French and converted it into their cipher code. On 3 June the telegram was sent to The Hague.70
Willem Leyds was taken aback. In mid-April, not long before, someone had delivered a message from F.W. Reitz. It had been encouraging: they still had sufficient weapons and food, meat and maize meal—monotonous but adequate. Clothing was in short supply, some men were reduced to wearing sheepskins, but they were determined to carry on. They seemed to be managing.
And now this. He had received two disturbing messages, one after another, the note from Bierens de Haan and Smuts’s telegram. Leyds knew that Smuts wasn’t pessimistic by nature. This made it all the more worrying. ‘Our circumstances are dire,’ he wrote. Their weapon supplies were almost depleted. Farms and food supplies had been destroyed. Women and children were imprisoned in camps, or roaming in woods and mountains. Some had been murdered by Swazis and Zulus. ‘Virtually all the kaffir tribes in the north’ were rebellious. Burghers were defecting to the British side. If nothing was done, it would end in an even bigger catastrophe. In spite of it all, Smuts admitted honestly, the president of the Orange Free State wouldn’t hear of giving up. He had urgently called for a conference, which was to be held as soon as a reply came from Kruger. They hadn’t heard from him for the past eight months. They wanted ‘a full, final statement so that we know where we stand’.71
This was no easy question. Leyds didn’t know the answer and the delegation wasn’t much help: Fischer was wary, Wessels invisible, Wolmarans a loose cannon. Nothing to be achieved there. They couldn’t even agree on where Kruger should be, let alone what he should do. Montagu White, the Transvaal consul to the United States, initially thought the old Boer leader should go there, to win sympathy. But then perhaps not, because it might harm his image. Or maybe later. Wolmarans urged Kruger to settle in The Hague, close to the royal court, the nobility, the government and the diplomatic corps. Leyds thought it a terrible idea for exactly the same reason. He went to great lengths to persuade Wolmarans of the undesirable diplomatic implications, and refused to give in. In January 1901 Kruger installed himself in Hotel des Pays-Bas in Utrecht; in April he moved to a guest house, Casa Cara, in Hilversum.
That’s where they held the meeting to discuss a reply to Smuts. Leyds was best equipped to deal with the factual matters, and so he did. Intervention by one of the powers wasn’t on the cards. It was impossible to get weapons through. He had tried and failed. However, judging by reports from England, the prospects in the Cape Colony weren’t unfavourable. Moreover, British public opinion was shifting in favour of the Boers. Everything possible was being done to help the women and children in the camps, the prisoners of war in exile, too. Those were the facts as they stood. But the answer to the most important question had to come from the president himself. Make peace or persevere? Kruger left nothing in doubt. The two republics had started the war together, he felt; both had already made huge sacrifices ‘in possessions and lives’, and they should pull together to the end. Even if, ‘God forbid, the situation became hopeless and further resistance impossible’. In other words, they should continue to fight together until it was no longer feasible. This was the wording of the telegram to Smuts, signed by Leyds and Fischer on Kruger’s behalf. On 11 June it was coded and sent to Pretoria.72
The reply was received by the consul-general, Domela Nieuwenhuis, who had it deciphered and sealed in an envelope, ready to be collected. But, again, Kitchener wouldn’t hear of the enemy making use of his communication lines, for security reasons. Roosegaarde Bisschop would have to go to Standerton again. Kitchener laid on a special train, this time with all due ceremony and privileges. He probably had high expectations. The train was escorted by 100 men, it stopped nowhere, the regular service was held up, and the military railway staff were ‘most accommodating’. On 15 June 1901 Roosegaarde Bisschop delivered Kruger’s telegram to a grateful Smuts.
The British had apparently failed to crack the Dutch cipher code (though they did later), or otherwise Kitchener wouldn’t have taken the trouble to have the telegram delivered so quickly. This boosted the Transvaal leaders’ morale, as did the outcome of two recent encounters on the battlefield. On 29 May, General Jan Kemp had inflicted heavy losses on a British column at Vlakfontein in the western Transvaal. And on 12 June, General Chris Muller had overpowered an Australian unit of around 350 men of the 5th Victorian Mounted Rifles at Wilmansrust, near Ermelo. Their weapons, which included pom-poms, were more than welcome, not to mention their ammunition, clothing and food.
Burger, Reitz, Botha and Smuts had regained their confidence, to the surprise of Steyn and De Wet, who on 20 June 1901 had come to the meeting in Waterval, in the vicinity of Standerton, feeling indignant and apprehensive. Hertzog, De la Rey and Viljoen were present as well. All the most important Transvaal and Free State leaders were meeting face to face for the first time since Cyferfontein, eight months earlier. It was high time they did. Little had come of the Cyferfontein resolution. Steyn opened the meeting by denouncing the Transvalers’ unauthorised peace initiatives, although this hadn’t come to the point where he would have to fight on alone. To his relief, he noted that their ‘indecisiveness appeared to have vanished’ as a result of Kruger’s message. They had closed ranks again. Unanimously they reaffirmed their commitment to peace only on condition of independence for both republics. In addition, the Transvalers agreed to organise a raid on the Cape in support of the Free State men who were already operating there. De la Rey would equip the expedition, Smuts would be in command.
To inform the burghers, they published a General Notice that same day. It explained the telegrams they had exchanged with President Kruger and included a report on the ‘Conference of the Governments of the Two Republics’. They claimed that the Waterval resolution had the support of ‘the vast majority of our nation, women and children as well as men’. The crux of the notice was that ‘no peace will be made nor terms for peace accepted which would divest us of our independence and autonomous existence as a nation, or harm the interests of our brothers in the colonies [Natal and the Cape], and that the war shall be continued with vigour’.73
Emily Hobhouse was excited at the prospect—although she also had misgivings that she wouldn’t admit to. She would keep her vow before a full audience in the Queen’s Hall. There, she would tell the British people about the suffering of the Boer women and their children. That was the mission she had sworn to accomplish. The date had been set for 24 June 1901 and 2500 people were expected. ‘The musical centre of the Empire’ was sold out. John Percival, the bishop of Hereford, was to chair the evening. Then it all fell apart. On government orders, the theatre cancelled the contract. Her talk was called off on account of the risk of public disturbances. An alternative venue, Westminster Chapel, rejected her application. The great public event in London failed to materialise.
Hobhouse thought it was worse for those pitiful women trapped in the war zone in South Africa, thousands of kilometres away. She felt she had let them down. They were brave, but they and their sick, undernourished children were entirely on their own. Who else would plead their cause? She had witnessed the atrocities with her own eyes. For three months, from late January to the end of April, she had visited internment camps, which were euphemistically called refugee camps. At any rate, she had seen as much as Kitchener would allow her to. And there was Milner as well. Once he had been appointed to administer the two new colonies, he had become less accommodating than in the past. Besides Bloemfontein, she had visited five more camps: Norvals Pont, Aliwal North and Springfontein in the Orange River Colony, as well as those in Kimberley and Mafeking, but she had been denied access to the area north of Bloemfontein and to the whole of the Transvaal.
From what she had seen, the camps were all much of a muchness. Some were marginally less unsanitary than others, some were administered by men with at least a modicum of concern for the welfare of their charges, and here and there she met dedicated nurses. But on the whole, conditions in the overcrowded and unhygienic camps were abominable. People slept on the ground in leaky tents, deprived of sufficient food, milk, water and soap. The ablution facilities were disgraceful. No provision was made for the sick or for disposal of the bodies of the dead. Women and children were without warm clothing for the approaching winter.
The military authorities were indifferent. The camps were congested, with catastrophic consequences. While travelling back and forth between them, Hobhouse had seen transports of women and children, crowded like animals in open railway trucks, unprotected against wind and rain. As a result of her campaign, conditions at the Bloemfontein camp had started to improve when, a few weeks later, 2000 new inmates arrived, doubling the population and inevitably aggravating the problem. This, finally, had prompted her decision to return to England. She had done all she could, she had been denied access to other camps, the military regime prevented her from doing anything more. The only way forward, she believed, was to campaign in Britain, in the hope that a public outcry would compel the British government to intervene. And once this was accomplished, she would return to South Africa.74
Hobhouse sailed from Cape Town on the Saxon on 8 May 1901. As it happened, Milner was also on board. He had taken a few months’ leave; Kitchener was replacing him as high commissioner during his absence. Hobhouse made several attempts to speak to Milner in private, but he seemed to be avoiding her. Only after they had passed Madeira did an opportunity present itself. In the course of their conversation she discovered the reason for his unwillingness to meet her. In the preceding months he had received 64 reports, all containing the same allegations against her. She was accused of inciting unrest in the camps and playing at politics. He himself, Milner could assure her, was nevertheless willing to allow her to return to the country, but it was ultimately for the government to decide.
The Saxon docked in Southampton on 24 May. The administrator and the activist parted ways. Emily Hobhouse went to her bedsit in Chelsea. Alfred Milner was received by four Cabinet members—Salisbury, Chamberlain, Balfour and Lansdowne—and the commander-in-chief, Roberts. He was driven to Marlborough House in an open landau to appear before King Edward VII. He left Marlborough as Lord Milner, Baron of St James’s and Cape Town.75
Hobhouse threw herself into her work, trying to gain access to politicians. She succeeded, through influential connections in Liberal circles. Her uncle and aunt, Lord and Lady Hobhouse, were also able to help her, as was Lord Ripon, Chamberlain’s predecessor as secretary of state for the colonies and, as of late, president of the South African Women and Children’s Distress Fund. Through them she met the Opposition leader, Campbell-Bannerman, and other prominent Liberal parliamentarians.
The war minister, Brodrick, also agreed to receive her. She went to see him on 4 June, bearing a list of recommendations. First, she demanded the release of all women and children in the camps who had relatives or friends in the Cape or who would be able to provide for themselves there, irrespective of whether their husbands were hensoppers, prisoners of war, deceased or still active in the field. No more women or children were to be sent to the already overcrowded camps. Every camp was to have a bilingual woman director. And finally, she asked the authorities to appoint a supervisory committee with at least six members representing philanthropic organisations. Hobhouse, of course, offered her services. In the circumstances her proposals were reasonable. Brodrick listened to her politely, agreed to consider her ideas, but promised nothing.
His indifference stood in sharp contrast to Campbell-Bannerman’s outrage a week later. The Opposition leader had been trying to steer a middle course between the pro-Boer and the Liberal Imperialist factions in his party, but his meeting with Hobhouse tipped the scales. At a dinner on 14 June he delivered an uncharacteristically emotional speech to his party members. He outlined the atrocities Hobhouse had described and denounced the reign of terror against the civilian populations of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. ‘War is war,’ he said, quoting Brodrick’s usual laconic response to this kind of criticism, but in Campbell-Bannerman’s view, this was no longer a war. ‘When is a war not a war?’ His reply left a lasting impression on his audience. ‘When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa.’76
Methods of barbarism. Campbell-Bannerman had called the devil by its name. His words echoed in the press and resounded throughout the country. Normally harsh critics, like Lloyd George, expressed their indignation in even stronger terms. In a debate in the Commons three days later he grilled Brodrick about the number of women and children in the camps and the mortality rate. The figures Brodrick cited—a total of 63,000 persons in both white and black camps, and 336 deaths in the Transvaal camps in May alone—were far too low, but they were also considerably higher than those which the government had conceded previously. In response, Lloyd George accused the Cabinet of pursuing ‘a policy of extermination’. Whether intentional or not, he said, this was the outcome. The military authorities had embarked on their mission to depopulate the highveld six months earlier and enough time had elapsed to bring the camps up to standard. Hundreds of children were dying each month. It was an utter disgrace.
But Brodrick stuck to his guns, arguing, as always, that the Boers and their guerrilla activities were to blame; their wives and children were sent to the camps in their own best interest. He denied allegations of neglect. They were doing all they could to improve conditions in the camps. The majority of Conservatives were satisfied. Lloyd George’s no-confidence motion was defeated, with the Liberal Imperialists abstaining from voting.
The document that had caused all the upheaval was released a day later, on 18 June. The ‘Report of a Visit to the Camps of Women and Children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies’ held no surprises. Soon after her arrival, Hobhouse had circulated drafts of it among supporters and opponents alike. The 15-page final version described the problems and set out recommendations to improve the situation. In an appendix she reported on her interviews in the camps.
She had succeeded in drawing public attention to the suffering of Boer women and children, but what had that actually achieved? The Cabinet had brushed off the criticism like dandruff. She had been refused permission to organise a mass demonstration in London. She was invited to give talks in other parts of the country, but none of them were on the same scale as the one in the Queen’s Hall.
There was another bitter disappointment. In mid-July 1901 Hobhouse received Brodrick’s reply to her recommendations. A few had been adopted, certain categories of women would be allowed to leave the camps. A special commission would be appointed, but, contrary to her proposal, it would be instructed to conduct further investigations, not exercise supervision. Six women were already being considered for the job: two physicians, a nurse, a labour inspector and a general’s wife. The commission would be headed by the prominent protofeminist Mrs Millicent Fawcett. Brodrick described the candidates as women who were ‘removed from the suspicion of partiality to the system adopted or the reverse’—which, as he observed, did not apply to Emily Hobhouse. Her report and lectures had generated ‘much controversy’. Her presence anywhere near the camps would not be tolerated.77
Deneys Reitz had lost all sense of time. It was still winter, that was clear; it seemed endless this year. But was it August? Or still July? Since he had left De la Rey’s camp at the end of May, one uneventful day had flowed into the next and it was hard to tell them apart. The nights, too, had all been the same; actually it was more like one long, bitterly cold night, interrupted only by the occasional gallop to warm up. Biltong, day in and day out. He could hardly remember what bread, salt, coffee, vegetables or tobacco tasted like. Nor did he have much of a plan. With Jan Kemp’s commando he had dodged British columns in the western Transvaal. He had taken part in an unsuccessful raid in Bechuanaland, crisscrossed the Orange Free State with a steadily dwindling group of Germans, and finally fallen in with Jacobus Bosman, a young Afrikaner who was making his way back to the Cape. That’s what Reitz was aiming for as well, and the reason why they were now travelling together.
He was despondent about what he’d seen on the way—the same ‘interminable plains devoid of human life’, abandoned homesteads, sheep clubbed or knifed to death, unploughed fields, ‘an infinite, unpeopled wasteland . . . even the natives having fled’. Once or twice they had come across laagers occupied by women and children, scores of them, taking refuge in caves or kloofs. That, anything, rather than being imprisoned in camps.
It had also become more difficult to cross the railway line that bisected the Orange Free State. They had succeeded twice, but at Edenburg they’d been forced to abandon their third attempt. The British had been tightening up security to guard their strategic lines of communication. They had built a cordon of blockhouses at regular intervals, with barbedwire barriers filling the gaps between them. Sentries, both black and white, were stationed at each one. In their third attempt to cross the tracks, Reitz’s horse had become entangled in the barbed wire. Alerted by the ensuing noise, the sentries on duty had shot and killed it. Reitz managed to escape on a Shetland pony he had found roaming near a British camp a few days earlier.
So Reitz and Bosman were still on the west side of the railway line, but they had managed to get further south. Near Fauresmith they ran into trouble again. Three attempts were made to relieve them of their saddles and saddlebags. The first time, they had caught the thieves, but allowed them to go. The men had probably mistaken them for British spies. The second time, in Fauresmith itself, two ‘forbidding guardian angels’ had saved them from being robbed by a band of ‘riffraff’ who had been ‘ejected from the fighting commandos’. On the third occasion Reitz had apprehended the thieves, and grazed the arm of one of them with a bullet ‘to teach him better manners’.
Soon afterwards, they fell in with better company: General Hertzog, ‘a high-cheeked man with angry eyes’, who was in command of the southwestern districts, and his 300 men. Reitz had known him in Bloemfontein, where he had been a judge in the old days. He and Bosman were delighted to join Hertzog. They were also hoping that some of his men would want to accompany them on their journey to the Cape. In the event, they were unable to recruit even one. Everyone had been there on commando before and they were still smarting from the ordeal and their heavy losses. It looked as if Reitz and Bosman would have to continue on their own.
One morning, however, they found luck on their side. A small group of ten young Transvalers turned up, some of whom Reitz knew from the Pretoria Commando and the Afrikander Cavalry Corps. Though weatherbeaten and ragged, they still had a sense of humour. The ‘Rijk Seksie’ (Rich Section), they called themselves. They were making for the Cape. Things couldn’t have worked out better. The 12 of them would press on together.
The following day they took leave of Hertzog and his men, and headed south-east, where people who knew the area had advised them to cross the Orange. They would find fewer British troops, more wild horses and good grazing. But it did mean they would have to cross the railway line again. They returned to Edenburg, fortunately in the company of burghers who knew their way around and could guide them safely past the blockhouses and through the barbed-wire barricade.
All went well. Near the Caledon River they came upon troops of wild horses. Each man took two, Reitz a brown mare and a roan. Within a few days they were broken in. On their fresh mounts they rode almost all the way to the Orange. Across the river lay the Cape Colony. It was the end of August 1901. Reitz had found his bearings.78