I went out to the strongest firing, and toiled up a ladder of boulders.  I came up on to the sky-line, and bent and stole forward.  To the right was Cave Redoubt with the 4.7; to the left two field-guns, unlimbered and left alone, and some of the Rifle Brigade snug behind their stone and earth schanzes.  In front was the low, woody, stony crest of Observation Hill; behind was the tall table-top of Surprise Hill—­the first ours, the second the enemy’s.  Under the slope of Observation Hill were long, dark lines of horses; up to the sky-line, prolonging the front leftward, stole half-a-dozen of the 5th Lancers.  From just beyond them came the tack, tack, tack, tap.

Tack, tap; tack, tap—­it went on minute by minute, hour by hour.

The sun warmed the air to an oven; painted butterflies, azure and crimson, came flitting over the stones; still the devil went on hammering nails into the hills.  Down leftward a black-powder gun was popping on the film-cut ridge of Bluebank.  A Boer shell came fizzing from the right, and dived into a whirl of red dust, where nothing was.  Another—­another—­another, each pitched with mathematical accuracy into the same nothing.  Our gunners ran out to their guns, and flung four rounds on to the shoulder of Surprise Hill.  Billy puffed from Bulwan—­came 10,000 yards jarring and clattering loud overhead—­then flung a red earthquake just beyond the Lancers’ horses.  Again and again,—­it looked as if he could not miss them; but the horses only twitched their tails, as if he were a new kind of fly.  The 4.7 crashed hoarsely back, and a black nimbus flung up far above the trees on the mountain.  And still the steady tack and tap—­from the right among the Devons and Liverpools, from the right centre, where the Leicesters were, from the left centre, among the 60th, and the extreme left, from Caesar’s Camp.

The fight tacked on six mortal hours and then guttered out.  From the early hour they began and from the number of shells and cartridges they burned I suppose the Boers meant to do something.  But at not one point did they gain an inch.  We were playing with them—­playing with them at their own game.  One of our men would fire and lie down behind a rock; the Boers answered furiously for three minutes.  When they began to die down, another man fired, and for another three minutes the Boers hammered the blind rocks.  On six hours’ fighting along a front of ten or twelve miles we lost three killed and seventeen wounded.  And, do you know, I really believe that this tack-tapping among the rocks was the attack after all.  They had said—­or it was among the million things they were said to have said—­that they would be in Ladysmith on November 9, and I believe they half believed themselves.  At any rate I make no doubt that all this morning they were feeling—­feeling our thin lines all round for a weak spot to break in by.

They did not find it, and they gave over; but they would have come had they thought they could come safely.  They began before it was fully light with the Manchesters.  The Manchesters on Caesar’s Camp were, in a way, isolated:  they were connected by telephone with headquarters, but it took half an hour to ride up to their eyrie.  They were shelled religiously for a part of every day by Puffing Billy from Bulwan and Fiddling Jimmy from Middle Hill.