Battle of Groenkloof In the Battle of Groenkloof on 5 September 1901 , a British column under Colonel Harry Scobell defeated and captured a small Boer commando led by Commandant Lotter in the Cape Colony during the Second Boer War . Background . While General Lord Kitchener struggled to suppress guerilla 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 . To combat the guerilla war raging in the two Boer republics , Kitchener employed sweep - and - scour columns , farm burning and a policy of forcing Boer women and children into concentration camps . However , using such harsh methods in the loyal Cape Colony was politically impossible . Instead , the British commander in the Cape Colony , General Sir John French resorted to a three - pronged strategy : first , to prevent Boer commandos from combining , second , to chase them constantly in order to prevent them from collecting new followers and supplies , and third , to tire them out so that they could be hunted down . One historian notes , " How simple an antidote to guerilla warfare , compared with that immense operation of burning farms and carting off the whole civilian population of the countryside into the camps ! " Battle . Armed with information from French ' s excellent Field Intelligence Department and led by African Intelligence scouts , Scobell pursued Lotter ' s commando in the Tandjesburg mountains . Scobell , whose command included the 9th Lancers , the Cape Mounted Rifles and Imperial Yeomanry , was reputedly one of the most efficient British column commanders . 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 . Believing that Lotter ' s men occupied a farm building , Scobell ordered a night march and deployed his 1100 soldiers on some ridges overlooking the farm . Actually , Lotter 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 . At dawn , a squadron of lancers was sent to investigate the " kraal " . The commanding officer , Lord Douglas Compton dropped his pistol near the entrance . As he dismounted to fetch his weapon , the Boers opened fire . Compton escaped , but the six men behind him were mowed down . Immediately , a thousand rifles opened up on the fearfully outnumbered Boers in the sheephouse . After a half hour of the unequal contest , the Boers surrendered . They suffered 13 killed and 46 wounded , while 61 unwounded survivors were hustled into captivity . Scobell ' s force lost 10 men killed . A British combatant said , " The sight was horrible in the extreme . . . 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 . " Aftermath . Lotter and seven others were later executed by the British authorities as rebellious subjects . Jan Smuts turned the tables on the British in the Battle of Elands River which followed ten days later . But as one historian points out , " In losing Lotter , the Boers had lost more than a tenth of the guerillas in the Colony south of the Orange , and their élite commando at that . . . the British Empire was a bottomless well , when it came to replacing lost troops . "