‘This seemed to give us all fresh courage and enthusiasm, and as the enemy came charging in their three divisions we repelled them with great loss to themselves. The right and left divisions of the enemy were simply forced to retire in disorder, leaving several of their comrades on the veld. The centre detachment of the enemy succeeded in reaching the drift of the spruit, but the Burgher fire was too hot for them; a part of them fled back and succeeded in rejoining their main force, but seven of them were left wounded on the road, and, as we afterwards ascertained, nineteen of them took cover amongst the tall grass of the marsh, and lay in the mud and water until their main force retired from the scene towards evening, when we took the above-mentioned nineteen troopers prisoners. Poor fellows, they were in a sorry plight; they had been lying under water and mud all the time, with only their noses and mouths out of water for breathing. ‘As I said, the main force saw that they could not force our position, and retired, cutting across the veld with the hope of avoiding us; but while the majority of us remained to guard the road at the drift, about one hundred of us kept abreast of Jameson’s force, so as to prevent them from slipping through. ‘We saw Jameson was heading towards the railway cutting, so we raced on ahead and took possession of the cutting, using the embankment as a breastwork, and again brought the invaders to a full stop. As it was getting dark now, Jameson encamped for the night, out of rifle shot from the embankment; but he was near enough to keep on shelling our position, off and on, during the night. But as we were well protected by our embankment, no harm was done. ‘During the night, a sad accident happened. ‘The son of Commandant Cronje, who was rather too venturesome, had crossed the railway cutting and was riding about on the other side. We could not recognise him in the dark. We thought it was a spy from the enemy. We called out three times, “Who goes there?” but received no reply. Whether he did not hear us, I cannot say; some of our men fired and he fell, severely wounded. It is a sad thing that, out of five of our Burghers who have been killed, two have been killed by our own men, besides the one wounded just now by that careless young man. And another, I hear, has been killed to-day by our own men. He was near to the enemy, and as his dress was somewhat similar to Jameson’s troopers, he was fired at and killed; and our men only found out their mistake when too late.