information thus obtained that the British sustained a rather severe
check when they advanced against our positions near Senekal. One would
think the enemy would have taken strict precautions against their plans
leaking out in this manner, but I presume we were considered rather too
dense for that kind of thing.

The affair of Roodewal decided Roberts to send back a strong column to
keep us off his flanks. It was only infantry, and we got quite tired of
waiting for it to reach us. It reached Villiersdorp eventually, and we
fell back from Frankfort towards Bethlehem--the new headquarters. It was
with heavy hearts that we said good-bye to our kind friends in
Frankfort, for well we knew by this time what the passage of a British
column meant for the defenceless non-combatants--houses broken down and
burnt, children and greybeards torn from their families, and all the
other useless and unnecessary cruelties that have broken so many lives,
converted so many joyous homesteads into tombstones of black despair,
and imprinted into the very souls of many Afrikanders an ineradicable
loathing and hatred of everything British. As Boadicea felt towards the
Roman, so feels many a Boer matron to-day against the Briton, and when
Britons shall have followed Romans into the history of the past, the
Afrikander race shall write an epitaph upon their cenotaph. Ambition! By
that sin fell the angels, and by that sin fall the Angles. But oh, the
pity of it! For of all the nations that in turn have risen and waxed
great upon the surface of the globe, there are none for whose ideals the
Boers feel more sympathy than for those of the British. It is the
paralysing difference between the ideal and the real that is creating
the gulf which threatens our eternal separation.