We found our waggons awaiting us at Vereeniging on the 15th; we were thoroughly disgusted, as may be supposed. We had been retreating and retreating continuously, without a struggle, without an effort, offering no resistance.
However, we found that a _Long Tom_ had been brought up, mounted on a truck. It was protected by a steel shield and a rampart of sandbags. A second truck, also casemated with logs and sandbags, served as a magazine for powder and shell. But the kind of armoured train thus formed remained idle in the railway-station.
I inquired whether we were to attempt an attack and push forward. The answer was that we could not venture to cross the Vaal with the gun, because it was feared that the Free State Boers, who were displeased at the war, might blow up the railway bridge while the 'armoured train' was in the Orange territory, and thus deliver it into the hands of the English. Such was the spirit of confidence that reigned!
In spite of all this, we wished to try once more to organize an effective foreign legion. De Malzan, a former officer in the German army, was appointed Adjutant of the Uitlanders' Corps under Blignault, by the Government of Pretoria; his commission was signed by Reitz and Souza. He went, his jaw still bandaged for a wound received at Platrand, to confer with General Botha. He was very badly received.
'I do not recognise anyone's right to make appointments. Blignault is not a General, and you are nothing at all. The Europeans can all go back to their own countries. I don't want them. My Burghers are quite enough for me'--a remark he might have spared the European legion, which, out of about 280, had in the last two months lost fifteen killed, nineteen prisoners and eighty-seven wounded on the battlefields of Boshof, Taba N'chu, Brandfort and Zand River.
Anxious to clear up the question definitively, I left my camp on the other side of the Vaal, and made for Pretoria on the evening of the 18th in a coal-truck.
On the 19th I found Lorentz there. He had been made a Colonel. We held a council of war--Lorentz, still lame from his two wounds; Wrangel, with his arm in a sling; Rittmeister Illich, the Austro-Hungarian, and myself. It was decided that we should lay before the President a scheme of organization, from which I will quote a passage, as it shows the state of mind in which we all were: