The first thing in the morning the enemy began shelling our camp.  The convoy was sent on, not a scout with it.  Meantime, during the night several hundred Boer marksmen had been sent round into the sluit, and were now lying right across poor Broadwood’s retreat.  The Boers, acting with their devilish coolness as usual, took possession of the waggons without giving the alarm.  Our two batteries and Roberts’ Horse came along, and were allowed to get to point-blank distance, and then the volley came; magazine rifles at pistol-shot range.  For the moment the result, as at Magersfontein, was chaos.

Hornby dealt the first counter-blow.  With the five manageable guns he galloped back a bit and brought them into action at 1000 yards.  He showed first that it was going to be a fight and not a stampede.  “Steady and hit back,” said Q Battery.  You should hear the men talk of that battery.  It lost almost every man, killed or wounded, but it was the chief means in restoring some sort of order to the retreat.  But the disaster was past retrieving.  In killed, wounded, and prisoners we lost a third of our force, the whole convoy, and seven guns out of twelve.  I can see the question you are dying to ask.  Why on earth did Broadwood camp the wrong side of that ditch?  That is exactly the sort of question that a “blooming civilian” would ask.  And then came Reddersberg and the loss of another five hundred.  Christian De Wet again!  And all this within hearing, as you may say, of the main British army.

These disasters come most inopportunely for us.  Many of the Orange Free State Burghers, when their capital was taken, seem to have thought it was all up and some of them took the oath.  But this right and left of De Wet’s has changed that impression.  It comes just in time to fan into a fresh blaze embers that seemed dying out.  We hear that all the farmers who had taken the oath are under arms again.  They had not much choice, for the fighting Boers simply came along and took them.

My visit to old Modder River was very interesting.  It was quite deserted; only a few odds and ends of militia, where, when I remember it last, there were stately great squares of ordered tents and long lines of guns and limbers and picketed horses, and the whole place crawled with khaki, and one felt around one all the bustle and energy of a huge camp.  I felt quite melancholy, as when one revisits some scene of childhood changed beyond recall.  Trains were running regularly up to Kimberley and ordinary citizens were travelling up and down.  It seemed the war was forgotten.  To me, who had been living in the head and front of a big army for seven months, all these old signs of peace and a quiet life seemed strange enough.  There were some children going up with their papas and mamas.  As we came one after another to the lines of hills at Belmont and Graspan they pointed and crowded to the windows, and papa began to explain that the great fights had been here, and to tell all about them, quite wrong.