these men, and followed along the same road they had taken.  The ravine was a long, narrow gap between mountain ranges of immense height.  The sides of the mountains were covered with loose boulders, sufficient to protect the whole Boer army from our artillery fire.  The only track which a horseman could possibly follow wound in and out alongside the face of the cliffs, so narrow that even the horses bred in the country found it difficult to keep their feet upon it, and could only proceed, at funeral pace, in single file.  A handful of men could have held that place against an army.  With De Wet and Olivier gone, half our task was over.  The Boers made a blind rush, first to one nek, then to the next, only to find that Britain’s sons guarded them all.  Small bodies of men might escape, but the vast supplies of mealies, waggons, guns, and all the cumbrous appliances of war, without which an army is useless, were penned in.  The hand of the Field-Marshal was on them.  The blocking forces held the neks, and now those forces which had to strike were ordered to move.  No sooner did General Rundle receive his orders to advance than he rolled forward with the impetuosity of a storm breaking upon a southern coast.  They on the spot knew that all the enemy’s hopes lay centred round a town in the middle of the valley.  This town was Fouriesburg.  The general who could strike that town first would deal the death blow to the Boer forces in the Free State.  Rundle was furthest from the town; the pathway his troops would have to pursue was rougher and more rugged than that which lay open to the rest of the forces.

But Rundle knew his men; he knew their mettle; he had tried them with long, weary marching, and he knew that they were worthy of his trust.  He gave his orders.  The Leinsters and the Scots Guards, tall, gaunt, hunger-stricken warriors, whose ribs could be counted through their ragged khaki coats, swung out as cheerily as if they had never known the absence of a meal or the fatigue of a dreary march.  The Irishmen chaffed the Scots, and the Scots yelled badinage back to the sons of Erin, and onward they went, onward and upward, over the rock-strewn ground, through the narrow passes, fixing their bayonets where the ground looked likely to hold a hidden foe, ready at a moment’s notice to charge into the blackness that lay engulfed in those dreary passes.  But the enemy did not wait for them.  As the Eighth Division advanced, making the rocky headlands ring with the rhythm of their martial tread, the Boers fell back like driven deer, and the bugle spoke to the Scottish bagpipe until the silent hills gave tongue, and echo answered echo until the wearied ear sickened for silence.  Onward we swept, until Commando Nek lay like a grinning gash in the face of nature far in our rear.  When we did halt the men threw themselves down on the freezing earth, and wolfed a biscuit; then, stretching themselves face downwards on the grass, they slept with their