On September 24th came the last chapter in this phase of the campaign in the Eastern Transvaal, when at eight in the morning Pole-Carew and his Guardsmen occupied Komatipoort.  They had made desperate marches, one of them through thick bush, where they went for nineteen miles without water, but nothing could shake the cheery gallantry of the men.  To them fell the honour, an honour well deserved by their splendid work throughout the whole campaign, of entering and occupying the ultimate eastern point which the Boers could hold.  Resistance had been threatened and prepared for, but the grim silent advance of that veteran infantry took the heart out of the defence.  With hardly a shot fired the town was occupied.  The bridge which would enable the troops to receive their supplies from Lourenco Marques was still intact.  General Pienaar and the greater part of his force, amounting to over two thousand men, had crossed the frontier and had been taken down to Delagoa Bay, where they met the respect and attention which brave men in misfortune deserve.  Small bands had slipped away to the north and the south, but they were insignificant in numbers and depressed in spirit.  For the time it seemed that the campaign was over, but the result showed that there was greater vitality in the resistance of the burghers and less validity in their oaths than any one had imagined.

One find of the utmost importance was made at Komatipoort, and at Hector Spruit on the Crocodile River.  That excellent artillery which had fought so gallant a fight against our own more numerous guns, was found destroyed and abandoned.  Pole-Carew at Komatipoort got one Long Tom (96-pound) Creusot, and one smaller gun.  Ian Hamilton at Hector Spruit found the remains of many guns, which included two of our horse artillery twelve-pounders, two large Creusot guns, two Krupps, one Vickers-Maxim quick firer, two pompoms and four mountain guns.

CHAPTER 30.

The campaign of de wet.

It had been hoped that the dispersal of the main Boer army, the capture of its guns and the expulsion of many both of the burghers and of the foreign mercenaries, would have marked the end of the war.  These expectations were, however, disappointed, and South Africa was destined to be afflicted and the British Empire disturbed by a useless guerilla campaign.  After the great and dramatic events which characterised the earlier phases of the struggle between the Briton and the Boer for the mastery of South Africa it is somewhat of the nature of an anticlimax to turn one’s attention to those scattered operations which prolonged the resistance for a turbulent year at the expense of the lives of many brave men on either side.  These raids and skirmishes, which had their origin rather in the hope of vengeance than of victory, inflicted much loss and misery upon the country, but, although we may deplore the desperate resolution which bids brave men prefer death to subjugation, it is not for us, the countrymen of Hereward or Wallace, to condemn it.