"General Buller inquires whether you can safely leave your present position and advance to Henning's Station, or somewhere near where you can get a safe position, and also institute a policy of worry. He thinks if you could occupy Henning's Station Boers would fall back on Burghersdorp, or if you could get near enough to Burghersdorp to make night attack, it would be the thing to stop anxiety (_sic_). He adds Hildyard with a battalion and half sent a column of seven thousand Boers under Joubert himself flying. The above was probably wired before Buller read notification of the enemy's occupation of Dordrecht. He wired last night as follows: tell Gatacre he will have to take care of himself till 5th Division arrives. A telegram just received says he has given you a free hand."[7] [7] From copy of telegram in A.D.C.'s handwriting. Burghersdorp is about twenty-three miles north of Stormberg, and Henning is a station about ten miles west of Stormberg on the cross {228} line. This telegram, therefore, sketched a far more arduous and hazardous enterprise than that which Gatacre afterwards attempted. Within the next few days the Third Division was strengthened by the arrival of the 74th and 77th Batteries Royal Field Artillery, the First Battalion Royal Scots, the 33rd Company Army Service Corps, and the 16th Field Hospital. All these units were only just arrived from England, so that, although the additional battalion of infantry was very valuable, Gatacre was unable to employ the men on the raid that he had been planning for some time past. They would serve, however, to protect the camp, and would thus set the other two battalions free for use as a striking force. Even these had only been two and three weeks in the country respectively, and the General had had no opportunity of getting them into the hard condition and fighting form that was reached by his Brigade on the Nile. On December 8 he writes: "I am frightfully busy and worried. The whole of this country is seething with rebels, and as they are all mounted, and I have only a few mounted infantry on half-fed ponies, it is very difficult to cope with them. "I have now three regiments of infantry, but have a long railway line to guard, and every culvert has a couple of armed men in it. Fancy what an anxiety this is--their safety, their food, their overworked condition. If I had my Division I could really strike somewhere.... "I am hoping to move on a bit to-morrow or next day to recover some of the country given {229} up prior to my arrival, as I think occupation of a position in advance of this may tend to awe the Dutch behind me." In the _Official History_ we read that--