be cornered? No--Yes? A moment of excitement, anguish--joy! The General had mounted a kopje, reconnoitred, and discovered the truth. It was Cronje's force--the remnants of his convoy some 4000 yards off--the convoy streaming down into the drifts that lead to Petrusberg and thence to Bloemfontein! They must never reach that destination! Kitchener's words--"Head him and prevent his crossing the river"--so simple in sound, so complex in execution, thrilled every heart. Quickly the guns were got into action--grandly--almost magically--the first shot plumped--bang! in front of the leading waggon just as the convoy was preparing to descend the drift! What a reveillé! Cronje, as we know, was rushing from the clutches of the Sixth Division at Drieputs. Breathless, he gathered himself together. Suddenly he found himself assailed by a new force--a new terror! He divined in a moment what had happened. It was French, the ubiquitous French--French redivivus, as it were--who was putting the finishing touch to the chapter of disaster. Poor Captain Boyle, in his letter to the _Nineteenth Century_, thus described the great Dutchman's plight:-- "His only chance now was to sacrifice his guns and convoy, and cut his way across the river under the heavy fire of our guns. Immediately on the first shell bursting in the laager, about thirty Boers galloped out to seize a kopje on our right, afterwards called Roberts' Hill; but the 10th Hussars in a neck-and-neck race had the legs of them, and seizing the hill in advance, beat them off with their carbine and Maxim fire. The Boers from their laager answered our shell fire for a short time with great accuracy from two or three guns. But these were quickly silenced, and shell after shell from Artillery Hill fell plump into the laager. Finally, our second battery was moved to a little distance from Roberts' Hill and opened fire from the southern slope on to a kopje to which the Boers had retired. All that afternoon at intervals our guns poured shells into the laager, but no response came, and we spent our time watching the Boers, now 3000 yards away, entrenching themselves in the open and along the river-bank. Their waggons caught fire and the ammunition exploded, and as they realised their position more and more, so must their hearts have sunk. Anxiously must they have waited for the first sign of the infantry gathering round, as anxiously as we did in our turn watching from the high kopjes.