It Was A Desperate Measure, As It Was Vain To Suppose That The Warlike Kaffirs Would Permit Their Property To Be Looted Without Resistance, And If Once The Assegais Were Reddened No Man Could Say How Far The Mischief Might Go.

With great loyalty the British Government, even in the darkest days, had held back those martial races - Zulus, Swazis, and Basutos - who all had old grudges against the Amaboon.

Fouche's raid was stopped, however, before it led to serious trouble. A handful of Griqualand Mounted Rifles held it in front, while Dalgety and his colonial veterans moving very swiftly drove him back northwards.

Though baulked, Fouche was still formidable, and on July 14th he made a strong attack in the neighbourhood of Jamestown upon a column of Connaught Rangers who were escorting a convoy. Major Moore offered a determined resistance, and eventually after some hours of fighting drove the enemy away and captured their laager. Seven killed and seventeen wounded were the British losses in this spirited engagement.

On July 10th General French, surveying from a lofty mountain peak the vast expanse of the field of operations, with his heliograph calling up responsive twinkles over one hundred miles of country, gave the order for the convergence of four columns upon the valley in which he knew Scheepers to be lurking. We have it from one of his own letters that his commando at the time consisted of 240 men, of whom forty were Free Staters and the rest colonial rebels. Crewe, Windham, Doran, and Scobell each answered to the call, but the young leader was a man of resource, and a long kloof up the precipitous side of the hill gave him a road to safety. Yet the operations showed a new mobility in the British columns, which shed their guns and their baggage in order to travel faster. The main commando escaped, but twenty-five laggards were taken. The action took place among the hills thirty miles to the west of Graaf-Reinet.

On July 21st Crabbe and Kritzinger had a skirmish in the mountains near Cradock, in which the Boers were strong enough to hold their own; but on the same date near Murraysburg, Lukin, the gallant colonial gunner, with ninety men rode into 150 of Lategan's band and captured ten of them, with a hundred horses. On July 27th a small party of twenty-one Imperial Yeomanry was captured, after a gallant resistance, by a large force of Boers at the Doorn River on the other side of the Colony. The Kaffir scouts of the British were shot dead in cold blood by their captors after the action. There seems to be no possible excuse for the repeated murders of coloured men by the Boers, as they had themselves from the beginning of the war used their Kaffirs for every purpose short of actually fighting. The war had lost much of the good humour which marked its outset. A fiercer feeling had been engendered on both sides by the long strain, but the execution of rebels by the British, though much to be deplored, is still recognised as one of the rights of a belligerent.

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