Blockhouses and Night Attacks While the great events recorded at the end of my last chapter were in progress, I paid a visit to the Harrismith burghers, who were under the command of Commandant Jan Jacobsz, and also to some of the Bethlehem men.

On my return I learnt that the enemy were occupied in building a line of blockhouses from Heilbron to Frankfort.
It has always seemed to me a most unaccountable circumstance that England--the all-powerful--could not catch the Boers without the aid of these blockhouses.

There were so many other ways in which the thing might have been done, and better done; and the following incident, which occurred during the war, serves to show that this policy of the _blockhouse_ might equally well have been called the policy of the _blockhead_.
On the 27th of February, 1902, the English made one of their biggest "catches" in the Free State.

They had made a great "kraal"-- what they themselves call a "drive"-- and stood, "hand in hand," one might almost say, in a ring around us, coming from Heilbron, Frankfort, Bethlehem, and Harrismith, and stretching, on the Transvaal side, from Vrede to the Drakensberg.
Narrower and narrower did the circle become, hemming us in more closely at every moment.

The result was that they "bagged" an enormous number of men and cattle, without a solitary burgher (or, for the matter of that, a solitary ox) having been captured by means of their famous blockhouse system.
The English have been constantly boasting in the newspapers about the advantages of their blockhouses, but they have never been able to give an instance of a capture effected by them.