The trouble had been building for years. Britain had annexed the Boer republic of the Transvaal in 1877, and the farmers who lived there never accepted it. When a tax dispute over a seized wagon in Potchefstroom flared into armed resistance late in 1880, the British colonial administrator decided to pull his scattered garrisons back into Pretoria. Lieutenant Colonel Philip Anstruther, commanding the 94th at Lydenburg, received the order on 27 November. He was in no hurry. Rather than march light with the regulation dozen wagons, he waited until he had thirty-four, loaded with stores and personal effects, then set off on the 188-mile journey on 5 December. The bloated train crawled across the highveld at barely nine miles a day, sometimes only three when rivers ran high. He had been warned that the Boers were taking up arms. The historian John Laband described him as "bluff, good-natured and unfussed, with an amiable contempt for the Boers." That contempt would cost him.

On the morning of the battle, the column carried just thirty rounds per man instead of the regulation seventy, and only four scouts rode out. Around midday, some 150 Boers appeared on the left flank, and the music stopped. A rider named Paul de Beer approached under a white flag, carrying a letter from the Boer leadership in Heidelberg: stop where you are, or any further advance would be treated as a declaration of war. De Beer twice asked Anstruther directly - war or peace? The colonel answered that his orders were to reach Pretoria, and to Pretoria he would go. Before de Beer could even ride back to his own lines, the Boer commander Nicolaas Smit gave the order. Two to three hundred mounted riflemen galloped to within close range, flung themselves to the ground behind whatever cover the thorn scrub offered, and began firing with a speed that convinced the British they faced thousands.

The Boers were hunters who had learned to shoot as children, and they aimed first at the officers and sergeants. The British, bunched in close formation and caught in the open, never had time to take cover behind their wagons. Their return fire sailed high over the prone Boers, sights set to the wrong distance. Anstruther took five wounds to the legs. With every officer killed or down and his men being cut to pieces, he ordered the surrender to stop the slaughter. The numbers tell the story of how unequal it was: contemporary historians settle on around 157 British casualties - some sixty-eight killed and the rest wounded, including Anstruther, who died six days later after a leg amputation. The Boers lost perhaps one or two men. No one recorded the fate of the roughly sixty African wagon drivers caught in the crossfire, a silence that says much about whose lives the chroniclers counted.

The Boers took weapons, wagons and horses but left tents and rations so the wounded could make a camp. They allowed twenty unhurt soldiers to stay as nurses, and two to ride for medical help in Pretoria. One of them, a man named Egerton, smuggled out the regimental colours - they had been hidden on a stretcher beneath a wounded woman, Mrs Fox, and he wrapped the silk around his own body to carry it to safety. The three women who tended the wounded that day were each later awarded the Royal Red Cross. For the Boers, Bronkhorstspruit was an electrifying victory that committed them fully to rebellion. For the British, who had dismissed these farmers as no real soldiers, it was a humiliation they tried to explain away by blaming the dead Anstruther's carelessness. Three more Boer victories followed in quick succession, culminating at Majuba Hill, and Britain signed away the Transvaal's self-government. The peace would last only until 1899.