The affair of Roodewal decided Roberts to send back a strong column to keep us off his flanks.  It was only infantry, and we got quite tired of waiting for it to reach us.  It reached Villiersdorp eventually, and we fell back from Frankfort towards Bethlehem—­the new headquarters.  It was with heavy hearts that we said good-bye to our kind friends in Frankfort, for well we knew by this time what the passage of a British column meant for the defenceless non-combatants—­houses broken down and burnt, children and greybeards torn from their families, and all the other useless and unnecessary cruelties that have broken so many lives, converted so many joyous homesteads into tombstones of black despair, and imprinted into the very souls of many Afrikanders an ineradicable loathing and hatred of everything British.  As Boadicea felt towards the Roman, so feels many a Boer matron to-day against the Briton, and when Britons shall have followed Romans into the history of the past, the Afrikander race shall write an epitaph upon their cenotaph.  Ambition!  By that sin fell the angels, and by that sin fall the Angles.  But oh, the pity of it!  For of all the nations that in turn have risen and waxed great upon the surface of the globe, there are none for whose ideals the Boers feel more sympathy than for those of the British.  It is the paralysing difference between the ideal and the real that is creating the gulf which threatens our eternal separation.

OFF TO THE TRANSVAAL

When we reached Reitz, on our way to Bethlehem, another young Transvaaler and myself obtained permission to try and reach the Transvaal.  The enemy’s columns were traversing the intervening country in all directions, but we determined that the attempt was worth making.  Bidding good-bye to our Free State colleagues, we left the little village that was later to become famous as the scene of the capture of the Free State Government, and retraced our way to Frankfort.  The send-off given us took the form of a little reunion in the parlour of the modest hotel.  Here there were gathered together some dozen young Free Staters, and an impromptu smoking concert was held.  Everyone present was compelled to give a song or recite something.  The first on the programme was Byron’s “When we two parted,” which was sung with fine effect by a blushing young burgher.  Next came the old camp favourite, “The Spanish Cavalier.”  The sentimental recollections induced by these two songs were speedily dissipated by a rattling comic song in Dutch, “Op haar hot oog zit’n fratje” A few recitations followed.  One of the reciters had just enunciated the lines—­

    “Within the circle of your incantation
       No blight nor mildew falls,
     No fierce unrest, nor lust, nor lost ambition,
       Passes those airy walls”—­

when a mocking voice came floating in at the window—­

“Are you referring to Downing Street?” It was a captured British officer, who, roaming about the village, had been attracted by our revelry.  He was evidently no follower of the expand-or-burst policy of the British Cabinet.