Commandant Cronje was at the time of the war sixty-five years of age, a hard, swarthy man, quiet of manner, fierce of soul, with a reputation among a nation of resolute men for unsurpassed resolution.  His dark face was bearded and virile, but sedate and gentle in expression.  He spoke little, but what he said was to the point, and he had the gift of those fire-words which brace and strengthen weaker men.  In hunting expeditions and in native wars he had first won the admiration of his countrymen by his courage and his fertility of resource.  In the war of 1880 he had led the Boers who besieged Potchefstroom, and he had pushed the attack with a relentless vigour which was not hampered by the chivalrous usages of war.  Eventually he compelled the surrender of the place by concealing from the garrison that a general armistice had been signed, an act which was afterwards disowned by his own government.  In the succeeding years he lived as an autocrat and a patriarch amid his farms and his herds, respected by many and feared by all.  For a time he was Native Commissioner and left a reputation for hard dealing behind him.  Called into the field again by the Jameson raid, he grimly herded his enemies into an impossible position and desired, as it is stated, that the hardest measure should be dealt out to the captives.  This was the man, capable, crafty, iron-hard, magnetic, who lay with a reinforced and formidable army across the path of Lord Methuen’s tired soldiers.  It was a fair match.  On the one side the hardy men, the trained shots, a good artillery, and the defensive; on the other the historical British infantry, duty, discipline, and a fiery courage.  With a high heart the dust-coloured column moved on over the dusty veld.

So entirely had hills and Boer fighting become associated in the minds of our leaders, that when it was known that Modder River wound over a plain, the idea of a resistance there appears to have passed away from their minds.  So great was the confidence or so lax the scouting that a force equaling their own in numbers had assembled with many guns within seven miles of them, and yet the advance appears to have been conducted without any expectation of impending battle.  The supposition, obvious even to a civilian, that a river would be a likely place to meet with an obstinate resistance, seems to have been ignored.  It is perhaps not fair to blame the General for a fact which must have vexed his spirit more than ours—­one’s sympathies go out to the gentle and brave man, who was heard calling out in his sleep that he ’should have had those two guns’—­but it is repugnant to common sense to suppose that no one, neither the cavalry nor the Intelligence Department, is at fault for so extraordinary a state of ignorance. [Footnote:  Later information makes it certain that the cavalry did report the presence of the enemy to Lord Methuen.] On the morning of Tuesday, November 28th, the British troops were told that they would march at once, and have their breakfast when they reached the Modder River—­a grim joke to those who lived to appreciate it.