But there was no time to look on that or anything else but the amazing nimbleness of the guns.  At the shell—­even before it—­they flew apart like ants from a watering-can.  From, crawling reptiles they leaped into scurrying insects—­the legs of the eight horses pattering as if they belonged all to one creature, the deadly sting in the tail leaping and twitching with every movement.  One battery had wheeled about, and was drawn back at wide intervals facing the Boer hill.  Another was pattering swiftly under cover of a ridge leftward; the leading gun had crossed the railway; the last had followed; the battery had utterly disappeared.  Boom!  Whirr—­whizz—­e-e-e-e—­phutt!  The second Boer shell fell stupidly, and burst in the empty veldt.  Then bang!—­from across the railway—­e-e-e-e—­whizz—­whirr—­silence—­and then the little white balloon just over the place the Boer shell came from.  It was twenty-five minutes to nine.

In a double chorus of bangs and booms the infantry began to deploy.  Gloucesters and Devons wheeled half left off the road, split into firing line and supports in open order, trampled through the wire fences over the railway.  In front of the Boer position, slightly commanded on the left flank by Tinta Inyoni, was a low, stony ridge; this the Gloucesters lined on the left.  The Devons, who led the column, fell naturally on to the right of the line; Liverpools and Rifles backed up right and left.  But almost before they were there arrived the irrepressible, ubiquitous guns.  They had silenced the enemy’s guns; they had circled round the left till they came under cover of the ridge; now they strolled up, unlimbered, and thrust their grim noses over the brow.  And then—­whew!  Their appearance was the signal for a cataract of bullets that for the moment in places almost equalled the high-lead mark of Elandslaagte.  The air whistled and hummed with them—­and then the guns began.

The mountain guns came up on their mules—­a drove of stupid, uncontrolled creatures, you would have said, lumbered up with the odds and ends of an ironworks and a waggon-factory.  But the moment they were in position the gunners swarmed upon them, and till you have seen the garrison gunners working you do not know what work means.  In a minute the scrap-heaps had flow together into little guns, hugging the stones with their low bellies, jumping at the enemy as the men lay on to the ropes.  The detachments all cuddled down to their guns; a man knelt by the ammunition twenty paces in rear; the mules by now were snug under cover.  “Two thousand,” sang out the major.  The No. 1 of each gun held up something like a cross, as if he were going through a religious rite, altered the elevation delicately, then flung up his hand and head stiffly, like a dog pointing.  “Number 4”—­and Number 4 gun hurled out fire and filmy smoke, then leaped back, half frightened at its own fury, half anxious to get a better view of what it had done.  It was a little over.  “Nineteen hundred,” cried the major.  Same ritual, only a little short.  “Nineteen fifty”—­and it was just right.  Therewith field and mountain guns, yard by yard, up and down, right and left, carefully, methodically, though roughly, sowed the whole of Matawana’s Hoek with bullets.