And now the force had a straight run in before it, for it had outpaced any further force of Boers which may have been advancing from the direction of Magersfontein.  The horses, which had come a hundred miles in four days with insufficient food and water, were so done that it was no uncommon sight to see the trooper not only walking to ease his horse, but carrying part of his monstrous weight of saddle gear.  But in spite of fatigue the force pressed on until in the afternoon a distant view was seen, across the reddish plain, of the brick houses and corrugated roofs of Kimberley.  The Boer besiegers cleared off in front of it, and that night (February 15th) the relieving column camped on the plain two miles away, while French and his staff rode in to the rescued city.

The war was a cruel one for the cavalry, who were handicapped throughout by the nature of the country and by the tactics of the enemy.  They are certainly the branch of the service which had least opportunity for distinction.  The work of scouting and patrolling is the most dangerous which a soldier can undertake, and yet from its very nature it can find no chronicler.  The war correspondent, like Providence, is always with the big battalions, and there never was a campaign in which there was more unrecorded heroism, the heroism of the picket and of the vedette which finds its way into no newspaper paragraph.  But in the larger operations of the war it is difficult to say that cavalry, as cavalry, have justified their existence.  In the opinion of many the tendency of the future will be to convert the whole force into mounted infantry.  How little is required to turn our troopers into excellent foot soldiers was shown at Magersfontein, where the 12th Lancers, dismounted by the command of their colonel, Lord Airlie, held back the threatened flank attack all the morning.  A little training in taking cover, leggings instead of boots, and a rifle instead of a carbine would give us a formidable force of twenty thousand men who could do all that our cavalry does, and a great deal more besides.  It is undoubtedly possible on many occasions in this war, at Colesberg, at Diamond Hill, to say ‘Here our cavalry did well.’  They are brave men on good horses, and they may be expected to do well.  But the champion of the cavalry cause must point out the occasions where the cavalry did something which could not have been done by the same number of equally brave and equally well-mounted infantry.  Only then will the existence of the cavalry be justified.  The lesson both of the South African and of the American civil war is that the light horseman who is trained to fight on foot is the type of the future.