On September 19th, two days after Gough’s disaster, a misfortune occurred near Bloemfontein by which two guns and a hundred and forty men fell temporarily into the hands of the enemy.  These guns, belonging to U battery, were moving south under an escort of Mounted Infantry, from that very Sanna’s Post which had been so fatal to the same battery eighteen months before.  When fifteen miles south of the Waterworks, at a place called Vlakfontein (another Vlakfontein from that of General Dixon’s engagement), the small force was surrounded and captured by Ackermann’s commando.  The gunner officer, Lieutenant Barry, died beside his guns in the way that gunner officers have.  Guns and men were taken, however, the latter to be released, and the former to be recovered a week or two later by the British columns.  It is certainly a credit to the Boers that the spring campaign should have opened by four British guns falling into their hands, and it is impossible to withhold our admiration for those gallant farmers who, after two years of exhausting warfare, were still able to turn upon a formidable and victorious enemy, and to renovate their supplies at his expense.

Two days later, hard on the heels of Gough’s mishap, of the Vlakfontein incident, and of the annihilation of the squadron of Lancers in the Cape, there was a serious affair at Elands Kloof, near Zastron, in the extreme south of the Orange River Colony.  In this a detachment of the Highland Scouts raised by the public spirit of Lord Lovat was surprised at night and very severely handled by Kritzinger’s commando.  The loss of Colonel Murray, their commander, of the adjutant of the same name, and of forty-two out of eighty of the Scouts, shows how fell was the attack, which broke as sudden and as strong as a South African thunderstorm upon the unconscious camp.  The Boers appear to have eluded the outposts and crept right among the sleeping troops, as they did in the case of the Victorians at Wilmansrust.  Twelve gunners were also hit, and the only field gun taken.  The retiring Boers were swiftly followed up by Thorneycroft’s column, however, and the gun was retaken, together with twenty of Kritzinger’s men.  It must be confessed that there seems some irony in the fact that, within five days of the British ruling by which the Boers were no longer a military force, these non-belligerents had inflicted a loss of nearly six hundred men killed, wounded, or taken.  Two small commandos, that of Koch in the Orange River Colony, and that of Carolina, had been captured by Williams and Benson.  Combined they only numbered a hundred and nine men, but here, as always, they were men who could never be replaced.

Those who had followed the war with care, and had speculated upon the future, were prepared on hearing of Botha’s movement upon Natal to learn that De la Rey had also made some energetic attack in the western quarter of the Transvaal.  Those who had formed this expectation were not disappointed, for upon the last day of September the Boer chief struck fiercely at Kekewich’s column in a vigorous night attack, which led to as stern an encounter as any in the campaign.  This was the action at Moedwill, near Magato Nek, in the Magaliesberg.