as to indicate a direct advance on Bloemfontein from Naaupoort, he transferred them rapidly to the Modder river on the road to Kimberley, and on 11 February began a movement round the left flank of the force with which General Piet Cronje was at once besieging Kimberley and opposing Methuen. On 15 February the cavalry division of Major-General (afterwards Earl) French at Klip Drift, on the Modder, galloped through a gap in the Boer lines and rode on into Kimberley. Cronje, finding his communications with Bloemfontein threatened, began a retreat along the Modder. Roberts's infantry hung on to the Boer rear-guard, and on 17 February French, returning in haste from Kimberley, prevented Cronje from crossing the Modder. On the 18th the Boer laager at Paardeberg Drift was attacked by the British infantry divisions under (Sir) Thomas Kelly-Kenny [q.v.] and Kitchener, but this attack was repulsed with 1,270 casualties. Roberts, who had been detained at Jacobsdal by a slight illness, arrived the next day and decided not to renew the attack but to engage in a siege of the laager. Within a week the Boer position in the bed of the river had become desperate, and on 27 February, the anniversary of Majuba, Cronje surrendered with 4,000 men. The effect of Roberts's manœuvre was immediate. The Free State commandos left Natal to defend their own country, and Ladysmith was relieved on 28 February. Deficiency of transport and supplies, due largely to a successful raid by General Christian De Wet upon a large transport column, made an immediate advance on Bloemfontein impossible, and the Free Staters gathered a force to oppose Roberts's farther advance. At Poplar Grove on 7 March they succeeded in evading serious attack, but three days later they stood at Driefontein and were severely handled. This proved to be the last attempt of the Boers to offer battle in the Free State, and Bloemfontein was occupied on 13 March without opposition. After a pause in the Free State capital in order to restore railway communications and get up supplies, Roberts began an advance on Pretoria at the beginning of May. Moving on a broad front and turning the flanks of the Boers whenever they attempted to stand, he reached Kroonstad on 12 May; here a further halt was necessary, to enable the railways to be repaired. During this halt the news arrived that Buller had cleared Natal of Boers, and that Sir Archibald Hunter and Colonel (Sir) Bryan Mahon, moving north from Kimberley, had, in conjunction with a force under Colonel (afterwards Lord) Plumer, coming south from Rhodesia, relieved Mafeking, the last of the besieged garrisons.
The advance from Kroonstad was begun on 22 May and the Vaal was crossed two days later. On 31 May Roberts entered Johannesburg and, after overcoming a feeble resistance, occupied Pretoria on 5 June. On 12 June the main Boer force under General Louis Botha [q.v.] was defeated at Diamond Hill, and it appeared that organized resistance was at an end. President Kruger had removed his government to Machadodorp on the Delagoa railway, and there held some 4,000 British prisoners of war. An advance eastwards to Komati Poort, on the frontier of Portuguese East Africa, seemed all that was needed to complete the subjugation of the Transvaal, and this task was made easier by the junction of Buller's force advancing from Natal with Roberts's main body in the Transvaal in the first week of July. It was true that De Wet and the Free State leaders had been actively engaged in guerrilla warfare in their own country, but at the end of July a large body of Free Staters was surrounded on the border of Basutoland, and their commander, Prinsloo, surrendered with 4,000 men. Before this Roberts had begun his final advance, and on 28 July captured Machadodorp after some stiff fighting. Buller, pursuing the retreating Boers, occupied Lydenberg (6 September), French seized Barberton (13 September), and Major-General (Sir) Ian Hamilton entered Komati Poort (24 September). There was then no Boer town of importance which was not in British hands. Kruger fled to Lourenço Marques and on 11 October left Africa on board a Dutch vessel. The formal annexation of the Transvaal on 25 October, following that of the Free State (28 May), created the general impression that the War was at an end. Roberts was needed at home to succeed Wolseley as commander-in-chief, and he came back to England just in time to be received by Queen Victoria, one of the last of her acts being to reward him with the Garter and an earldom.
Roberts's generalship had changed a dark and doubtful situation in South Africa, with a rapidity which was almost startling, into one which, when he left that country, seemed brilliant. He had achieved the apparently impossible in converting the slow, lumbering columns of the early days of the War into bodies
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