Scarcely had De Wet made his escape ere the truth was borne in upon the burghers with an iron hand that their doom was sealed.  General Rundle’s force, which all along had been essentially a blocking force, and not a striking force, made a move on the 23rd of July.  All day the cannons spoke to the burghers from Willow Grange, all day long the rifles rippled their leaden waves of death.  We could see but little of the enemy; they lay concealed behind the loose rocks, and our men had little else to do but lift their rifles and pull the trigger, trusting to the powers that rule the destinies of war to speed the bullets to some foeman’s resting place.  But we knew they were there if we could not see them, for the snap and snarl of the Mauser rifles came readily to our ears, and the booming of their guns answered ours, as hound answers hound when the scent grows hottest.  We pounded them with shrapnel and pelted them with common shell until the air around them rained iron.  Our guns were six to one, yet those brave veldtsmen held their own with a stubborn courage worthy of the noblest traditions in all the red pages of war.  They gave us a parting shot at sundown, and at night, when the thick mists from the snow-draped mountains behind us came down upon the land and added to the darkness of the winter’s night, they moved their gun and fell back with it to a place where they could renew the battle on the morrow.  And at the dawning they testified their vitality by dropping a couple of shells right into the midst of the Imperial Yeomanry camp.

Whilst we were busy at Julies Kraal, drawing the Boers’ attention from other points, feinting as if we intended to push right on into Commando Nek, General Sir Archibald Hunter made a dash at Relief’s Nek with his force, and our cannon were busy at almost every point around the valley where the Boers were stationed.  General Prinsloo, who was in supreme command of the enemy’s forces, had no means of knowing where the British really meant to strike.  In vain he pushed men to anticipate Rundle’s threatened move, vainly he turned like a trapped tiger towards Hunter’s marching men.  Turn where he would, the khaki wave met him, rolling resistlessly inward and onward.  Hunter broke through with small loss, for the force which should have checked him at Retief’s Nek was waiting at Commando Nek for Rundle and the Eighth Division.  It was a master stroke, for when once Hunter was upon the inside of the valley he was in a position to threaten the rear of the Boer forces at Commando Nek, and that was a state of affairs which the enemy could not stand upon any terms.  A number of them, under clever Commandant Olivier, slipped away through Golden Gate.  They did not face the more open country even inside the big valley, but made their way through a piece of ground known as Witzies Hoek, and thence through a ravine which almost beggars description.  Later on I went with Driscoll’s Scouts in search of the tracks of