1900 - Mafeking siege day 173 (79%). Detachment of the Royal Irish Rifles and MI surrounded near Reddersburg. Settle occupies Upington.
1901 - Van Reenen enters Cape Colony.
In Mafeking:
I am heartily glad to say that Captain McLaren is not dead, although severely wounded and a prisoner in the Boers' hands.
A despatch was received from Colonel Plumer this morning stating that he had had an engagement north of the town and that his losses were Captain Crewe (who was buried here this morning), Lieutenant Milligan, killed; Colonel Plumer, Major Weston Jarvis, and Captain Rolt, slightly wounded; non-commissioned Officers and men killed, seven; wounded, twenty-six; missing, eleven. Three missing are known to be dead and the others are wounded in the Boers' hands. Captain McLaren has written from the Boer camp, where he is, we are all glad to hear, going on well and being very well treated by the Boers.
Yesterday afternoon we had a successful brush with the enemy to north-west, no casualties on our side. Their ambulances were seen very busy. To-day everything is so far quiet. . 4th. Early this morning Lieutenant F. Smitheman, Rhodesian Regiment, Colonel Plumer's intelligence officer, arrived through the Boer lines. I met him as he was going to change. He said, " How do you do? I am-glad to be in." I said, " Flow are you? I am very glad to see you, but I should be-glad to be out." However, there is no satisfying everybody. The country was infested by Boers and he had walked twenty-two miles that night accompanied by two natives. He is as a scout facile princeps, and thus eluded the hostile cordon successfully, though he had one anxious moment when he fell into the trench connecting Fort Ayr and the refugee laager, heard native voices, and was for some time under the impression it was the Boer trench. He was second in command of Colonel Plumer's scouts in 1896, and afterwards disappeared into Central Africa for two years, going from Chinde to Blantyre, to Lake Nyassa, then by Lake Bangueolo to the source of the Congo, thence due south through the Mashakalumbwe country to Victoria Falls, and through which country he was the first white man to pass, and from the falls to Bulawayo, where he arrived in December, 1898. Though his journeys then may have been long, arduous, and dangerous, they can scarcely have been more exciting than the short twenty-two miles he walked last night.
