By 1902 the war was all but lost for the Boers, yet a few thousand fought on. In the Western Transvaal, the brilliant general Koos de La Rey commanded around 3,000 guerrillas, the men who called themselves bitter-einders - fighters to the bitter end. Their situation was desperate. The British had stripped the veld bare, burned Boer farms and homes, and herded families into camps to deny the commandos shelter and supply. The bitter-enders survived largely on what they could capture from the enemy. And capture they did: only weeks earlier, on 7 March, De La Rey's men had routed a British column at Tweebosch, taking a general - Lord Methuen - prisoner along with six field guns. These ragged farmers remained, even now, a dangerous foe.

Lord Kitchener's answer to the guerrillas was methodical and grinding: a vast web of fortified blockhouses strung across the country, and great mounted "drives" that swept the veld like a net drawn tight. On 6 April he gave Colonel Ian Hamilton command of a drive to trap De La Rey, squeezing the Boers against the blockhouse lines near Klerksdorp. Colonel Robert Kekewich, one of Kitchener's column commanders, dug in on the hillside at Rooiwal. It was a stroke of luck. The Boers had scouted Rooiwal earlier and found it weakly held - but by the time they came to attack, Kekewich had quietly massed about 3,000 mounted infantry there, backed by six field guns and two pom-poms. The Boers did not know it. They charged a position far stronger than the one they had reconnoitred.

At about a quarter past seven, roughly 1,700 mounted riflemen under Commandant Ferdinandus Potgieter and General Jan Kemp swept forward to overrun what they believed was a thin British line. They rode straight into massed artillery and rifle fire. A forward British picket of forty men was overrun and badly mauled, and the sheer sight of the charge panicked some of the inexperienced Yeomanry, who bolted and could not be halted until a young officer, Lieutenant Carlos Hickie, stopped the stampede with a mix of pleading and threats. But the Boer charge could not survive that wall of fire. It broke about thirty metres from the British line. Fifty Boers were killed where they fell. Among the dead, conspicuous in a distinctive blue shirt, lay Potgieter himself, who had ridden almost to the muzzles of the guns.

The survivors made their retreat in good order, and the British fire from the saddle had cost Kekewich's line some fifty casualties of its own. When Hamilton arrived as the fighting ended, he held back from immediate pursuit, fearing the retreat was a trap; ninety minutes later his horsemen rode out, captured fifty more Boers, and recovered the guns lost at Tweebosch. One detail lingers. Kitchener had ordered that any Boer caught wearing a captured British uniform be shot - and a number of the wounded lay there in British khaki, having no other clothes. Hamilton overruled the order. He spared them. The battle settled little on its own; the Boers' losses were light and most escaped. But it was the war's last real stand. Peace talks opened in Pretoria on 19 May, with De La Rey himself among the negotiators, and within weeks the long, bitter conflict was over.