On April 10th Monro,
with Bethune's Mounted Infantry, captured eighty fighting Boers
near Dewetsdorp, and sixty more were taken by a night attack at
Boschberg. There is no striking victory to record in these
operations, but they were an important part of that process of
attrition which was wearing the Boers out and helping to bring the
war to an end. Terrible it is to see that barren countryside, and
to think of the depths of misery to which the once flourishing and
happy Orange Free State had fallen, through joining in a quarrel
with a nation which bore it nothing but sincere friendship and
goodwill. With nothing to gain and everything to lose, the part
played by the Orange Free State in this South African drama is one
of the most inconceivable things in history. Never has a nation so
deliberately and so causelessly committed suicide.
CHAPTER 33.
THE NORTHERN OPERATIONS FROM JANUARY TO APRIL, 1901.
Three consecutive chapters have now given some account of the
campaign of De Wet, of the operations in the Transvaal up to the
end of the year 1900, and of the invasion of Cape Colony up to
April 1901.
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