With an unerring instinct which was more useful to him than most of the knowledge he could have acquired in a European Staff College, and with an originality which if it had been displayed by a young British officer in an examination for promotion would probably have injured that officer’s prospects, Delarey dug his trenches not at the foot of the hill but in sinuous lines some little way in advance of it, by which he gained the power of meeting an attack with grazing or skimming fire, and which also removed the firing line from physical features on which the British guns could be laid.  It is said that he manned the works on the slope with burghers firing black powder so as to draw the enemy’s fire away from the trenches in which only smokeless powder was used.

[Illustration:  Modder River and Magersfontein.]

Methuen obtained little information during his halt at Modder River.  The country was so much intersected by the wire fences of the farms that cavalry scouting was difficult.  He decided to make a direct frontal attack upon Magersfontein on December 11 after a bombardment on the previous evening; and here, as at Colenso, the text-book preliminary shrapnel practice put the enemy on the alert and did no harm.  It greatly encouraged the burghers in their trenches.  Only three men were touched by the projectiles hurled by the naval, howitzer, field, and horse batteries; and an impending infantry advance was clearly indicated.  To the Highland Brigade under Wauchope, who had joined the command since the Modder River battle, was entrusted the execution of the night attack.  He does not appear to have altogether approved of Methuen’s scheme; but with the same dogged valour which he displayed many years before when he threw himself upon the Gladstonian political Magersfontein in Midlothian, he incorporated himself in it.

At 1 a.m. on December 12 in a storm of rain and thunder the Brigade in mass of quarter-columns marched out of its bivouac, guided by a staff officer’s compass which the lightning and the rain soon made unreliable.  The objective point was the southern edge of the Magersfontein Ridge, about three miles distant.  The progress made over the rough and encumbered veld was slow, and it was difficult to judge in the darkness how much ground had really been covered.  Wauchope either underestimated the distance made good or, as is more probable, did not expect to find the enemy entrenched in advance of the foot of the hill, and the error cost him his life and the lives of many other gallant Highlanders.  Afraid lest dawn should find his Brigade too far away from the position to rush it, he hesitated to deploy, and when at last he was about to give the order, a further delay was caused by a line of thorn bushes.  The Brigade passed through or avoided the obstruction and was at the halt on the point of changing formation when the Boers in the advanced trenches, which had been so stealthily excavated that no one in the British Army seems to