Then, Swinging To The Eastward, He Endeavoured To Cross
To The North Of Pretoria.
On the 19th he was heard of at Hebron.
Baden-Powell and Paget had, however, already barred this path, and
De Wet, having sent Steyn on with a small escort, turned back to
the Free State.
On the 22nd it was reported that, with only a
handful of his followers, he had crossed the Magaliesberg range by
a bridlepath and was riding southwards. Lord Roberts was at last
free to turn his undivided attention upon Botha.
Two Boer plots had been discovered during the first half of August,
the one in Pretoria and the other in Johannesburg, each having for
its object a rising against the British in the town. Of these the
former, which was the more serious, involving as it did the
kidnapping of Lord Roberts, was broken up by the arrest of the
deviser, Hans Cordua, a German lieutenant in the Transvaal
Artillery. On its merits it is unlikely that the crime would have
been met by the extreme penalty, especially as it was a question
whether the agent provocateur had not played a part. But the
repeated breaches of parole, by which our prisoners of one day were
in the field against us on the next, called imperatively for an
example, and it was probably rather for his broken faith than for
his hare-brained scheme that Cordua died. At the same time it is
impossible not to feel sorrow for this idealist of twenty-three who
died for a cause which was not his own. He was shot in the garden
of Pretoria Gaol upon August 24th. A fresh and more stringent
proclamation from Lord Roberts showed that the British Commander
was losing his patience in the face of the wholesale return of
paroled men to the field, and announced that such perfidy would in
future be severely punished. It was notorious that the same men had
been taken and released more than once. One man killed in action
was found to have nine signed passes in his pocket. It was against
such abuses that the extra severity of the British was aimed.
CHAPTER 29.
THE ADVANCE TO KOMATIPOORT.
The time had now come for the great combined movement which was to
sweep the main Boer army off the line of the Delagoa railway, cut
its source of supplies, and follow it into that remote and
mountainous Lydenburg district which had always been proclaimed as
the last refuge of the burghers. Before entering upon this most
difficult of all his advances Lord Roberts waited until the cavalry
and mounted infantry were well mounted again. Then, when all was
ready, the first step in this last stage of the regular campaign
was taken by General Buller, who moved his army of Natal veterans
off the railway line and advanced to a position from which he could
threaten the flank and rear of Botha if he held his ground against
Lord Roberts. Buller's cavalry had been reinforced by the arrival
of Strathcona's Horse, a fine body of Canadian troopers, whose
services had been presented to the nation by the public-spirited
nobleman whose name they bore.
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