In Many Native Broils And In The British Campaign Of
1881 He Had Shown Himself A Capable Leader.
His record in standing
out for the independence of the Transvaal was a very consistent
one, for he had not accepted office under the British, as Kruger
had done, but had remained always an irreconcilable.
Tall and
burly, with hard grey eyes and a grim mouth half hidden by his
bushy beard, he was a fine type of the men whom he led. He was now
in his sixty-fifth year, and the fire of his youth had, as some of
the burghers urged, died down within him; but he was experienced,
crafty, and warwise, never dashing and never brilliant, but slow,
steady, solid, and inexorable.
Besides this northern army there were two other bodies of burghers
converging upon Natal. One, consisting of the commandoes from
Utrecht and the Swaziland districts, had gathered at Vryheid on the
flank of the British position at Dundee. The other, much larger,
not less probably than six or seven thousand men, were the
contingent from the Free State and a Transvaal corps, together with
Schiel's Germans, who were making their way through the various
passes, the Tintwa Pass, and Van Reenen's Pass, which lead through
the grim range of the Drakensberg and open out upon the more
fertile plains of Western Natal. The total force may have been
something between twenty and thirty thousand men. By all accounts
they were of an astonishingly high heart, convinced that a path of
easy victory lay before them, and that nothing could bar their way
to the sea.
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