The battle casualties of January 6 outnumbered in the proportion of 6 to 4 the entire losses due to the acts of the enemy during the whole four months’ investment before and after that date.  Twice Wagon Point was occupied only by the wounded and the dead.  Much of the fighting was either hand to hand or at such short range that the effect of the bullet could be almost read in the expression on the face of the stricken opponent; now of anguish, despair, or hatred, now of a gentle sinking to sleep after toil.  The homely name of Wagon Hill, far away from the fatherland under the southern sun, will abide for all time in the chronicles of the deeds of the British private soldier.  It was his own battle, by which he saved Ladysmith.  Next day a message from home reached White.

“Heartily congratulate you and all under your command for your brilliant success.  Greatly admire conduct of Devonshire Regiment.”  The Sender was Queen Victoria.

The failure of the attack on the Platrand deterred the Boers from further attempts to break into Ladysmith, which was left like Paris thirty years before to “stew in its own juice.”  An ingenious but impracticable method of bringing the place to its senses by damming the Klip River below the town in the hope of isolating it by flood was put in hand, and some alarm was created, but the loyal stream refused to rise.  The garrison was too much weakened by disease and famine to be able to assist effectively Buller’s promised advance by way of Potgieter’s Drift, and in fact he never came near enough to Ladysmith to make co-operation possible.  A mobile column was for the second time organized by White, but it is doubtful whether it could have taken the field.

Perhaps some poet of a future generation may follow the example of the Homeric syndicate and select the Siege of Ladysmith as the theme of a great Epic, romantically but unhistorically interwoven with the legend of Juana Maria of Badajoz.  On the Boer side the struggle was carried on with much of the simplicity of Homeric times and the Siege of Troy.  The debates in the war councils; the doubts of the subordinate commanders; the devices and stratagems, such as the attempt to dam the Klip River, and the proposal to disguise an assaulting commando in the helmets and accoutrements of the slain opponents; the abstinence of some of the leaders from the fray; the single combats on Wagon Point; the democratic organization of the Boer forces; the difficulty of keeping the burghers to their duty when the attraction of a domestic and pastoral life presented themselves in an alluring form; were not of these days nor even of the Puritan period, but belonged to a remoter age when every man was a soldier or a shepherd according to the exigences of the moment.  Many a Boer leader, like Ajax, defied the lightning—­when it was not playing directly upon him.  Not one of them comes prominently into the foreground in the great South African siege.