Note Back to Main Text — PART II. TREKKING. (continued 2)

On the 15th Colonel Hicks again took out a small force of all arms,[14] for the purpose of getting in more stores, of burning Bezuidenhout's farm (it being now clear he had murdered two telegraphists), and to hold the kopjes we were on the 13th, while the Somersetshire Light Infantry marched to join us from Pochefstroom. The country was now thoroughly infested with Boers, who made some slight effort to oppose Colonel Hicks. He very soon brushed them aside, however, and, marching his force along two parallel ranges of low hills, arrived at the place where we had bivouacked on the night of the 12th-13th. Dinners were cooked on arrival before the companies went out marauding. Whilst they were being prepared a cartridge went off in one of the fires, and severely wounded one of the cooks, the bullet penetrating his chest. This poor fellow was later on sent into hospital at Krugersdorp, and, as the wound never improved, was eventually invalided home. But the line was blown up just in front of his train, and he was brought back to hospital. He soon began to recover, and one day went wandering about without his hat, got sunstroke, and died, one piece of bad luck on the top of another, and a melancholy example of how 'when sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.'