British columns were converging, however, from several quarters, and De Wet had to be at once on the move.  On the 26th Dewetsdorp was reoccupied by General Charles Knox with fifteen hundred men.  De Wet had two days’ start, but so swift was Knox that on the 27th he had run him down at Vaalbank, where he shelled his camp.  De Wet broke away, however, and trekking south for eighteen hours without a halt, shook off the pursuit.  He had with him at this time nearly 8000 men with several guns under Haasbroek, Fourie, Philip Botha, and Steyn.  It was his declared intention to invade Cape Colony with his train of weary footsore prisoners, and the laurels of Dewetsdorp still green upon him.  He was much aided in all his plans by that mistaken leniency which had refused to recognise that a horse is in that country as much a weapon as a rifle, and had left great numbers upon the farms with which he could replace his useless animals.  So numerous were they that many of the Boers had two or three for their own use.  It is not too much to say that our weak treatment of the question of horses will come to be recognised as the one great blot upon the conduct of the war, and that our undue and fantastic scruples have prolonged hostilities for months, and cost the country many lives and many millions of pounds.

De Wet’s plan for the invasion of the Colony was not yet destined to be realised, for a tenacious man had set himself to frustrate it.  Several small but mobile British columns, those of Pilcher, of Barker, and of Herbert, under the supreme direction of Charles Knox, were working desperately to head him off.  In torrents of rain which turned every spruit into a river and every road into a quagmire, the British horsemen stuck manfully to their work.  De Wet had hurried south, crossed the Caledon River, and made for Odendaal’s Drift.  But Knox, after the skirmish at Vaalbank, had trekked swiftly south to Bethulie, and was now ready with three mobile columns and a network of scouts and patrols to strike in any direction.  For a few days he had lost touch, but his arrangements were such that he must recover it if the Boers either crossed the railroad or approached the river.  On December 2nd he had authentic information that De Wet was crossing the Caledon, and in an instant the British columns were all off at full cry once more, sweeping over the country with a front of fifteen miles.  On the 3rd and 4th, in spite of frightful weather, the two little armies of horsemen struggled on, fetlock-deep in mud, with the rain lashing their faces.  At night without cover, drenched and bitterly cold, the troopers threw themselves down on the sodden veld to snatch a few hours’ sleep before renewing the interminable pursuit.  The drift over the Caledon flowed deep and strong, but the Boer had passed and the Briton must pass also.  Thirty guns took to the water, diving completely under the coffee-coloured surface, to reappear glistening upon the southern bank.