The main body of the Army with the Commander-in-Chief at its head entered the Transvaal at Viljoen’s Drift on May 27, and, like the pioneer columns of French and Ian Hamilton, met with no opposition.  It was of good augury for the speedy subjugation of the South African Republic.  The expected firm stand of the enemy along the right bank of the Vaal, where the great battle of the war was to be fought, was not made.  Vereeniging and subsequently Meyerton were abandoned in spite of all Botha’s efforts to keep his burghers’ faces to the front.  He held a strong line enclosing Vereeniging and the drifts and extending from near Heidelberg to Potchefstroom, but it impotently watched the British troops crossing the river.  Some opposition was indeed offered to French when he was a day’s march from the drift by which he had crossed into the Transvaal, but the bulk of the commandos fell away to the north and took up positions between Johannesburg and Krugersdorp.  By arrangement between the Governments, none of the Free Staters accompanied Botha into the Transvaal; but he was in communication with De Wet at Frankfort, and was urging him to act against the railway in the Free State.  He must have regretted that the strong hand and will of the man of Waterval Drift, Kitchener’s Kopje, Sannah’s Post, and Mostert’s Hoek, were not with him on the right bank of the Vaal to animate the shrinking burghers of the South African Republic.

The immediate purpose of Lord Roberts was now the capture of Johannesburg, the relations of some of whose inhabitants towards Pretoria had brought on, not only the Jameson raid, but also the war.  Although it was not defended by permanent military works, the burghers had taken up a position before it which might be very hard to capture, and there was another and greater cause for anxiety.  The task before Lord Roberts may be likened to an attack on a ship manned by pirates, who threaten to fire the magazine as soon as a hand is laid upon the bulwarks.  It was seriously proposed by certain persons in authority under Kruger, that on the appearance of the British Army before the city, the mines in which so many millions of British capital were invested should be wrecked; and it is probable that the threat would have been carried out with official sanction if Botha had not set his face resolutely against such a piratical act.

[Sidenote:  Map, p. 240.]

Lord Roberts proposed to effect the capture of Johannesburg by surrounding it.  While with the main body of his Army he occupied Elandsfontein on the east, French and Ian Hamilton, the pioneers of the advance from Bloemfontein, would deal with the enemy posted south of the city and then establish themselves, the former near Klipfontein, north of it, and the latter near Florida, west of it.  The right and the most vulnerable part of the Boer line was posted on Doornkop near the scene of the surrender of Jameson, the enthusiast, who, a few years before, had endeavoured with a few hundred adventurers and soldiers of fortune to solve the South African question which Great Britain was now tackling with a quarter of a million of trained soldiers.