Friday and Saturday brought nothing but a message from Froneman, again encouraging them to resist until reinforcements could be brought from Bloemfontein. On Saturday evening Jan Theron, of Krugersdorp, succeeded in breaking through the British lines with despatches from General De Wet and Commandants Cronje and Froneman, urging General Cronje to fight a way through the lines whilst they would engage the enemy from their side. Cronje and his officers decided to make an attempt to escape, and on Sunday morning the burghers commenced the construction of a chain-bridge across the Modder to facilitate the crossing of the swollen river. Fortunately for the Boers the British batteries fired only one shot into the camp that day, and the burghers were able to complete the bridge before night by means of the ropes and chains from their ox-waggons. On Monday morning the British guns made a target of the bridge, and shelled it so unremittingly that no one was able to approach it, much less make an attempt to cross the river by means of it. The bombardment seemed to grow in intensity as the day progressed, and when two shells fell into a group of nine burghers, and left nothing but an arm and a leg to be found, the Krijgsraad decided to hoist a white flag on Tuesday morning. General Cronje and Commandant Schutte were the only officers who voted against surrendering. They begged the other officers to reconsider their decision, and to make an attempt to fight a way out, but the confidence of two men was too weak to change the opinions of the others. In a position covering less than a square mile of territory, hemmed in on all sides by an army almost as great as that which defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, surrounded by a chain of fire from carbines, rapid-fire guns and heavy cannon, the target of thousands of the vaporous lyddite shells, his trenches enfiladed by a continuous shower of lead, his men half dead from lack of food, and stiff from the effect of their narrow quarters in the trenches, General Cronje chose to fight and to risk complete disaster by leading his four thousand men against the forty thousand of the enemy. The will of the majority prevailed, and on February 27th, the anniversary of Majuba Hill, after ten days of fighting, the white flag was hoisted above the dilapidated laager. The bodies of ninety-seven burghers lay over the scene of the disaster, and two hundred and forty-five wounded men were left behind when General Cronje and his three thousand six hundred and seventy-nine burghers and women limped out of the river-bed and surrendered to Field-Marshal Lord Roberts.