It Was His Declared Intention To Invade Cape Colony With
His Train Of Weary Footsore Prisoners, And The Laurels Of
Dewetsdorp Still Green Upon Him.
He was much aided in all his plans
by that mistaken leniency which had refused to recognise that a
horse is in that country as much a weapon as a rifle, and had left
great numbers upon the farms with which he could replace his
useless animals.
So numerous were they that many of the Boers had
two or three for their own use. It is not too much to say that our
weak treatment of the question of horses will come to be recognised
as the one great blot upon the conduct of the war, and that our
undue and fantastic scruples have prolonged hostilities for months,
and cost the country many lives and many millions of pounds.
De Wet's plan for the invasion of the Colony was not yet destined
to be realised, for a tenacious man had set himself to frustrate
it. Several small but mobile British columns, those of Pilcher, of
Barker, and of Herbert, under the supreme direction of Charles
Knox, were working desperately to head him off. In torrents of rain
which turned every spruit into a river and every road into a
quagmire, the British horsemen stuck manfully to their work. De Wet
had hurried south, crossed the Caledon River, and made for
Odendaal's Drift. But Knox, after the skirmish at Vaalbank, had
trekked swiftly south to Bethulie, and was now ready with three
mobile columns and a network of scouts and patrols to strike in any
direction.
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