Panting horses brought to the little stone farmhouse, where General De Wet was drinking milk, the long-awaited scouts who carried the information that the British force had evacuated Thaba N’Chu late in the afternoon, and that it was moving hurriedly toward Bloemfontein.  Again the order:  “Opzaal,” and the mule train came into motion and the burghers mounted their horses.  A chill night air arose, and shivering burghers wrapped blankets around their shoulders.  The humming of hymns and the whistling ceased, and there was nothing but the clatter of horses’ hoofs, the shouts of the Basutos, and the noises of the guns and waggons rumbling over the stones and gullies to mark the nocturnal passage of the army.  Lights appeared at farmhouse windows, and at their gates were women and children with bread and bowls of milk and prayers for the burghers.  Small walls enclosing family burial plots where newly-dug ground told its own story of the war seemed grim in the moonlight; native huts with their inhabitants standing like spectres before the doors appeared like monstrous ant-heaps—­all these were passed, but the drooping eyes of the burghers saw nothing.  At midnight another halt was made, horses were off-saddled and men lay down on the veld to sleep.  The generals and officers met in Krijgsraad, and other scouts arriving told of the enemy’s evident intention of spending the remainder of the night at an old-time off-saddling station known as Sannaspost.  The news was highly important, and the heads of the generals came closer together.  Maps were produced, pencil marks were made, plans were formed, and then the sleeping burghers were aroused.  The trek was resumed, and shortly afterward the column was divided into two parts; the one consisting of nine hundred men under General Peter De Wet, proceeding by a circuitous route to the hills south of Sannaspost, and the other of five hundred men commanded by General Christian De Wet moving through a maze of kopjes to a position west of the trekking station.

The burghers were not informed of the imminence of a battle; but they required no such announcement from their generals.  The atmosphere seemed to be surcharged with premonitions of an engagement, and men rubbed sleep out of their eyes and sat erect upon their horses.  The blacks even ceased to crack their whips so sharply, and urged the mules forward in whispers instead of shrieks.  Burghers took their rifles from their backs, tested the workings of the mechanism and filled the magazine with cartridges.  Artillerymen leaped from their horses and led them while they sat on the cannon and poured oil into the bearings.  Young men speculated on the number of prisoners they would take; old men wrote their names on their hats by the light of the moon.  The lights of Bloemfontein appeared in the distance, and grey-beards looked longingly at them and sighed.  But the cavalcade passed on, grimly, silently, and defiantly, into the haunts of the enemy.