It was almost magical the way the Boer fire dropped.  The guns came into action about a quarter-past nine, and for an hour you would hardly have known they were there.  Whenever a group put their heads over the sky-line 1950 yards away there came a round of shrapnel to drive them to earth again.  Presently the hillside turned pale blue—­blue with the smoke of burning veldt.  Then in the middle of the blue came a patch of black, and spread and spread till the huge expanse was all black, pocked with the khaki-coloured boulders and bordered with the blue of the ever-extending fire.  God help any wounded enemy who lay there!

Crushed into the face of the earth by the guns, the enemy tried to work round our left from Tinta Inyoni.  They tried first at about a quarter-past ten, but the Natal Volunteers and some of the Imperial Light Horse met them.  We heard the rattle of their rifles; we heard the rap-rap-rap-rap-rap of their Maxim knocking at the door, and the Boer fire stilled again.  The Boer gun had had another try at the Volunteers before, but a round or two of shrapnel sent it to kennel again.  So far we had seemed to be losing nothing, and it was natural to suppose that the Boers were losing a good deal.  But at a quarter-past eleven the Gloucesters pushed a little too far between the two hills, and learned that the Boers, if their bark was silent for the moment, could still bite.  Suddenly there shot into them a cross-fire at a few hundred yards.  Down went the colonel dead; down went fifty men.

For a second a few of the rawer hands in the regiment wavered; it might have been serious.  But the rest clung doggedly to their position under cover; the officers brought the flurried men up to the bit again.  The mountain guns turned vengeful towards the spot whence the fire came, and in a few minutes there was another spreading, blackening patch of veldt—­and silence.

From then the action nickered on till half-past one.  Time on time the enemy tried to be at us, but the imperious guns rebuked him, and he was still.  At length the regiments withdrew.  The hot guns limbered up and left Rietfontein to burn itself out.  The sweating gunners covered the last retiring detachment, then lit their pipes.  The Boers made a half-hearted attempt to get in both on left and right; but the Volunteers on the left, the cavalry on the right, a shell or two from the centre, checked them as by machinery.  We went back to camp unhampered.

And at the end of it all we found that in those five hours of straggling bursts of fighting we had lost, killed and wounded, 116 men.  And what was the good? asked doubting Thomas.  Much.  To begin with, the Boers must have lost heavily; they confessed that aloud by the fact that, for all their pluck in standing up to the guns, they made no attempt to follow us home.  Second, and more important, this commando was driven westward, and others were drawn westward to aid it—­and the Dundee force was marching in from the east.  Dragging sore feet along the miry roads they heard the guns at Rietfontein and were glad.  The seeming objectless cannonade secured the unharassed home-coming of the 4000 way-weary marchers from Dundee.