On the morning of the 23rd we struck our camp a few miles north of the Nek, and advanced to find out whether the enemy were in position here or not.  We started before daylight.  The night had been intensely cold and very wet.  On the high mountains snow had fallen.  The sky was heavily clouded, and about sunrise-time dense masses of mist rose and clung about the hills, sometimes closing in the view at fifty yards and then drifting off and leaving it clear again.  Our scouts advanced steadily, reconnoitring hill after hill and ridge after ridge, but still there was no sound of firing, and we began to think that the enemy had abandoned the place altogether.  This preliminary scouting work, poking about in the hills with a handful of men to find the enemy, always reminds me of tufting for deer in the Exmoor woods before the pack is laid on.

Then there came a few shots from our extreme right, from the hills on the right of the valley’s nose, sounding very muffled and dull in the mist, and we, out on the left, advanced with the more caution.  It was my chance to come upon the enemy first on this side, and as it will give you a fair notion of the usual risks of scouting, I will tell you how it happened!

I was out with my tufters on the left front, and we were drawing with all possible care the hills on that side.  In front of us was a tall peak, and I sent a few men to work round it on the left while I went round the right.  This hill really overlooked the Boer position.  My left flankers got round and rejoined me in front.  Either they must have been concealed from the Boers by the mist or have been mistaken for a party of Boers themselves, for they had passed within a few hundred yards of the edge where the enemy lay and were not fired at.

Damant, our captain, coolest and bravest of officers, now joined me, and with two or three men we pushed cautiously on towards some loose rocks, which, from the top of the rise, seemed to command a view of the valley beneath.  We had advanced to within eighty yards of the rocks, in open order, when we thought we heard voices talking, and immediately afterwards some one said loudly in Dutch, “Who rides there?” And then another voice more to the right exclaimed, “Here they are!” At the same instant one caught a motion as of heads and shoulders cuddling down and adjusting themselves in a disagreeable way.  There they were and no mistake, all tucked in among the rocks like wood-lice.

Our position then was a curious one, for we had actually walked quite in the open up to within speaking distance of the main Boer position, a position that was to defy our army for a day and a half.