ted without
serious fighting, the British having only fifty casualties. Three days
later, at Driefontein, between forty and fifty miles from
Bloemfontein, a stand was made which required a severe struggle to
overcome. "The enemy opposed us throughout yesterday's march,"
{p.305} Roberts telegraphed; "and from their intimate knowledge of the
country gave us considerable trouble.... The brunt of the fighting
fell upon Kelly-Kenny's division, two battalions of which, the Welsh
and the Essex, turned the Boers out of two strong positions at the
point of the bayonet." The British here lost 63 killed, 361 wounded.
The defenders, contrary to their habit, failed to carry away their
dead, of whom the victors buried 127. In the Boer papers their loss
was reported to be seven killed and eighteen wounded--a suggestive
discrepancy. No further opposition of consequence was encountered, and
on March 13 Roberts entered Bloemfontein.

The occupation of Bloemfontein and the relief of Ladysmith closed for
a time the British operations, and were followed by a period of
suspended advance. This was imposed in part by the fatigue of the
soldiery, a cause, however, which would not have lasted more than a
few days--except in the case of the hunger-weakened defenders of
Ladysmith. A prolonged stop was required for several reasons. The
conduct of the war had now reverted to the original plan of an
invasion in {p.306} force through the Free State by the great mass of
the British army. To this, all other movements were subsidiary,
including those of even such a great corps as that of Buller, upon a
line so important as the Natal railroad. But the central mass under
the Commander-in-Chief had momentarily exhausted itself, not in
organic vitality but in function power of movement, owing to the
excessive strain upon the transport service and the expenditure of
animal life in the forced marches and severe privations in the past
month under conditions always most trying to unacclimated horses. The
British Assistant Secretary of War said in Parliament that Lord
Roberts arrived at Bloemfontein with his horses wholly starved and his
men half-starved. The "wreck of an army," wrote a correspondent
present, "lies scattered in and about Bloemfontein." Paralysing as
such a condition is under any circumstances it was trebly so in a
force which by a sudden rush, a leap rather than a march, had
projected itself a hundred miles from any solid base of operations,
an