"My very definite orders, and the fact that I was not to move till the last possible moment, which necessitated my averaging seventeen miles a day, strengthened the assumption that I was taking part in a combined movement, in which great exactitude in conforming to the time table is, of course, of the utmost importance. In a telegram which Lord Roberts had sent to General Hamilton a short time before on a similar occasion he had impressed on him the importance of columns arriving simultaneously. As I had been officially informed that General Hamilton was in occupation of Heilbron, I assumed that my orders to be there on the 29th indicated that that was the day on which he would be required to take part in the general advance, and that any delay on my part would either retard the advance and upset the Commander-in-Chief's calculations, or that by leaving Heilbron unoccupied I should hand over an important supply depot to the enemy. I have thus explained why in no circumstances should I have felt myself justified in disobeying Lord Roberts's orders, which I simply carried out from first to last. I now proceed to recite the circumstances in which I became acquainted with Colonel Spragge's difficulties, and the action I took. "I left Ventersburg on May 24 as ordered, and on the 26th, after a fight outside Lindley, entered it, finding that the place had been vacated by us, a fact of which no notification had been given me, though I had been informed of our occupation of it. Marching at daylight on the following morning we crossed the Rhenoster River just before sunset, having been engaged the greater part of the day, and on the morning of the 28th I received the following message: 'Colonel Spragge to General Colvile. Found no one in Lindley but Boers. Have five hundred men, but only one day's food. Have stopped three miles back on Kroonstad road. I want help to get out without great loss.--B. Spragge, Lieutenant-Colonel, May 27, 1900.' I asked the orderly who Colonel Spragge was, and on hearing from him that he was the officer commanding the Yeomanry I learned for the first time that these troops were following me. The statement, which I have seen several times repeated in the papers, that I had urged the Yeomanry to hurry after me, is absolutely untrue. I have reason to believe that this baseless newspaper report has obtained credence in some high official quarters. I have already expressed my views of the necessity of being at Heilbron at the time ordered, and as it is a recognised rule of war that the lesser must be sacrificed to the greater interest, I should in any circumstances have considered it my duty to push on even had I been sure that such action would have entailed the loss of the Yeomanry. But in this case I had two additional reasons for doing so. First, that, as Colonel Spragge had succeeded in retiring three miles on the Kroonstad road I was convinced that he would have no