Note Back to Main Text — Chapter X

"Experience had shown," he writes, "that the line of defensible posts, extending across the Orange River Colony, from Jacobsdal to Ladybrand, constituted a considerable obstacle to the free movement of the enemies' roving bands, and that the gradual completion of chains of blockhouses placed at intervals of a mile, sometimes less, along the Transvaal and Orange River Colony railways, had obtained for our traffic a comparative security which it had not previously enjoyed."[258]