wn. I was in touch with scattered parties of enemy last
night. Have just sufficient supplies to take me into Hopetown." The
message was addressed to Chief, Pretoria, and repeated to the
lieutenant-general commanding the operations to suppress the invasion.
Knowing that the cyclists might draw blank at Strydenburg, a second
copy of the message was sent by the hand of a Kaffir, to be delivered
at the telegraph office in Britstown. As events turned out it was the
cyclists' telegram which went, and, as intended, upset the apple-cart
which the general subsequently tried to drive over the brigadier's
prostrate form. In the strict letter of the military law which, in so
many cases, subordinates individual initiative and sound judgment, the
action taken by the brigadier was indefensible. But as a matter of
fact the mutiny was not so terrible as it at first appears. Setting
aside the common-sense issue which ought to guide officers in senior
commands when accepting orders from a superior, it should be
remembered that the brigadier had only been directed to co-operate
with the officer who had now taken unto himself the position of
supreme command. Lord Kitchener himself, at the meeting on the De Aar
platform, had given the brigadier a roving commission, to be
controlled only by orders from Pretoria and the lieutenant-general at
De Aar. Consequently he resented his free action being clogged by a
senior whose only object seemed to be a desire to hug him and his
force as closely as possible for self-protection against imaginary
dangers. The brigadier, who was in every way as capable a soldier as
any in South Africa, had not spent eighteen months in following, or
being followed by, Boers, without arriving at a very shrewd estimate
of their tactics. The lore of the chase in which he was engaged, as he
read it, pointed to a break back on the part of the main body of the
invaders in the direction of the Orange River; and having balanced his
conception of the situation with his conscience, he considered that
the most serviceable move he could make was to place himself and his
brigade upon the railway at Hopetown. And so having sent the cyclists
to smell out the land of Strydenburg, the New Cavalry Brigade, working
in three parallel columns, fringed round the east end of the Beer Vlei
and struck north-east, with the backs of its rear-guard turned on the
Karoo for ever.

"How about Zwingelspan?" queried the brigade-major, remembering the