itself.  Then we groaned.  There had been a check.  The distant drama continued.  The huddling figures began to move again—­lithe, active forms moved about rearranging things—­officers, we knew, even at the distance.  Then the whole wave started again full of impetus—­started—­went forward, and never came back.  And at this we were all delighted, and praised the valour of our unequalled infantry, and wished we were near enough to give them a cheer.

So we watched until nightfall, when some companies of the Queen’s, from General Hildyard’s Brigade, arrived, and took over the charge of our hill from us, and we descended to get our horses, and perhaps some food, finding, by good luck, all we wanted, and lay down on the ground to sleep, quite contented with ourselves and the general progress of the army.

The action of the 21st had begun before I awoke, and a brisk fusillade was going on all along the line.  This day the right attack stood still, or nearly so, and the activity was confined to the left, where General Hildyard, with five battalions and two batteries, skilfully felt and tested the enemy’s positions and found them most unpleasantly strong.  The main difficulty was that our guns could not come into action to smash the enemy in his trenches without coming under his rifle fire, because the edge of the plateau was only a thousand yards from the second and main Boer position, and unless the guns were on the edge of the plateau they could see very little and do less.  The cavalry guarded the left flank passively, and I remember no particular incident except that our own artillery flung the fragments of two premature shells among us and wounded a soldier in the Devonshire Regiment.  The following fact, however, is instructive.  Captain Stewart’s squadron of the South African Light Horse dismounted, held an advanced kopje all day long under a heavy fire, and never lost a man.  Two hundred yards further back was another kopje held by two companies of regular infantry under equal fire.  The infantry had more than twenty men hit.

On the 22nd the action languished and the generals consulted.  The infantry had made themselves masters of all the edge of the plateau, and the regiments clustered in the steep re-entrants like flies on the side of a wall.  The Boers endeavoured to reach them with shells, and a desultory musketry duel also proceeded.

During the afternoon I went with Captain Brooke to visit some of the battalions of General Hart’s Brigade and see what sort of punishment they were receiving.  As we rode up the watercourse which marks the bottom of the valley a shrapnel shell cleared the western crest line and exploded among one of the battalions.  At first it seemed to have done no harm, but as we climbed higher and nearer we met a stretcher carried by six soldiers.  On it lay a body with a handkerchief thrown across the face.  The soldiers bearing the stretcher were all covered with blood.