On The 17th., Moving Along The
Northern Side Of The Mountains, He Appeared At Commando Nek On The
Little Crocodile River, Where He Summoned Baden-Powell To
Surrender, And Received Some Chaff In Reply From That Light-Hearted
Commander.
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.
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