Personally, Cronje was not an extraordinary character.  He was urbane in manner and a pleasant conversationalist.  Like the majority of the Boers he was deeply religious, and tried to introduce the precepts of his religion into his daily life.  Although he was sixty-five years old when the war began he had the energy and spirit of a much younger man, and the terrors and anxieties of the ten days’ siege at Paardeberg left but little marks on the face which has been described as Christlike.  His patriotism was unbounded, and he held the independence of his country above everything.  “Independence with peace, if possible, but independence at all costs,” he was wont to say, and no one fought harder than he, to attain that end.

When the Vryheid commandos rode over the western border of their district and invaded Natal, Louis Botha, the successor of Commandant-General Joubert, was one of the many Volksraad members who went forth to war in the ranks of the common burghers.  After the battle of Dundee, in which he distinguished himself by several daring deeds, Botha became Assistant-General to his lifelong friend and neighbour General Lucas Meyer.  Several weeks later, when General Meyer fell ill, he gave his command to his compatriot, General Botha, and a short time afterward, when Commandant-General Joubert was incapacitated by illness, Botha was appointed to assume the responsibilities of the commander-in-chief.  When Joubert was on his deathbed he requested that Botha should be his successor, and in that manner Louis Botha, burgher, became Louis Botha, Commandant-General, in less than six months.

It was remarkable, this chain of fortuitous circumstances which led to Botha’s rapid advancement, but it was not entirely due to extraneous causes, for he was deserving of every step of his promotion.  There is a man for every crisis, but rarely in history is found a record of a soldier who rose from the ranks to commander-in-chief of an army in one campaign.  It was Meyer’s misfortune when he became ill at a grave period of the war, but it was the country’s good fortune to have a Botha ready at hand to fight a Colenso and a Spion Kop.  When the burgher army along the Tugela was hard pressed by the enemy and both its old-time leaders, Joubert and Meyer, lay ill at the same time, it seemed little less than providential that a Botha should step out of the ranks and lead the men with as much discretion and valour as could have been expected from the experienced generals whose work he undertook to accomplish.  It was a modern representation of the ploughman deserting his farm in order to lead in the salvation of Rome.