While General Lord Kitchener struggled to suppress guerrilla warfare carried on by the Boers in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, some Dutch settlers living in the Cape Colony also took up arms against the British.

One historian notes, "How simple an antidote to guerrilla warfare, compared with that immense operation of burning farms and carting off the whole civilian population of the countryside into the camps!

On the fifth day of a six-day mission, the British officer found his quarry in a mountain gorge called Groenkloof, near the village of Petersburg.

Actually, Lötter and his 130-man commando had taken shelter in a nearby 30-by-15 foot stone sheephouse or kraal, which was topped with a corrugated iron roof.

In fact the place was like a butcher's shop, some men making awful noises groaning clutching the ground and rolling in the dirt in their agony.