Hussars, Natal Mounted Rifles, three batteries Royal Field
artillery, 1st Liverpool, 1st Devonshire, 2nd Gordon
Highlanders.]

[Sidenote: Oct. 12th Joubert also starts.]

Joubert quitted Zandspruit on the 12th October, and was at Volksrust
in the evening, with the forces of Generals Kock and Lukas Meyer
thrown widely forward on his right and left flanks respectively. Kock,
coming through Botha's Pass with his motley foreign levies,[89] halted
for the night at the mouth of the defile, whilst the units of the left
horn of the invading crescent, reinforced this day by the commandos of
Middelburg and Wakkerstroom, lay under Meyer some forty miles
eastward, some in Utrecht, some in Vryheid, and some already at the
concentration point, the Doornberg. On the 13th, whilst the wings
remained quiescent, Joubert, with the main column, occupied Laing's
Nek, having first, either by an excess of precaution, or from a fear
lest the gap between him and Meyer were too great, made good that
formidable obstacle by a turning movement around the left and over the
Buffalo at Wools Drift; this was executed by his advance guard
(Pretoria, Boksburg, part of Heidelberg, Standerton, Ermelo) under
Erasmus. But though a coal-truck drawn by cables through the long
tunnel, which penetrated the Nek, proved it to be neither blocked nor
mined, this stroke of fortune rather increased than allayed the
caution of the Boer General, to whom, grown old in Native wars,
nothing appeared more suspicious than an unimpeded advance against an
enemy. On the 14th he was still on the Nek, whilst Erasmus moved
timidly on Newcastle, and Kock, who remained on the Ingagane,
despatched a reconnoitring party of the German Corps along the
Drakensberg, to gain touch with Trueter's Free Staters at Mueller's
Pass. This patrol, riding back next day, found Newcastle occupied by
the commandos of Erasmus. The little town was almost empty of
inhabitants, and the burghers wrought havoc amongst the deserted shops
and houses. Not all the remonstrances of their officers, nor the
general order from Headquarters, nor even the heavy wrath of their
Commandant-General, who arrived in the town on the 18th, could stop
their ruthless plundering, and by nightfall the township was a scene
of sordid devastation.

[Footnote 89: See Appendix 4.]

[Sidenote: Joubert's net.]

On the afternoon of the 16th Joubert called a council of war. So far
he had been witho