With an editorial desire to link the separate operations into one chain, I may here describe from personal experience what happened away on that left flank where French and Hamilton were hotly engaged with the outposts of a Boer force, whose object in holding the high kopjes between Gatsrand and Klipriviersberg was obviously to force upon us a wider flanking movement, by which the western columns would be further separated from the main body and thus unable to co-operate with it effectively. It is improbable that Louis Botha had any hope of being able to defeat the British forces in detail by delivering a counter-stroke on each column in turn. It is far more likely that his idea even at that period was to lengthen out the British line of communications as far as possible, thus weakening it by attenuation and making it more vulnerable to attacks by small raiding parties. Co-operating with him was Christian De Wet, to whom such a plan would have been sure to commend itself as offering a chance for numbers of Free-Staters to slip through the girdle that was gradually closing about them, re-cross the Vaal, and harass their enemies on ground where local knowledge would give them every advantage. On this supposition the resistance offered to General French some twenty-five miles north-west of Vereeniging had peculiar interest for me, because I watched the operations there with some foreknowledge of the probable Boer tactics gained in a curious way. Four days earlier I had breakfasted at a farm next to Christian De Wet’s, not far from Rodewal station. The farmer invited myself and a companion into his house, above which a white flag was flying, and when told that this was our Queen’s birthday he produced a bottle of whisky with which to drink to Her Majesty’s health, which we did readily enough, although he declined to join us. There was no unfriendliness or want of hospitality in that, and, indeed, we should have mistrusted the man if he had put on a pretence of loyalty because he had been induced to hoist the white flag as an emblem of neutrality. There were no troops at that moment nearer than Lumsden’s Horse, who could be seen on the sky-line about four miles westward, moving towards Vredefort Road Station.