Every officer who showed got a round of shrapnel at him.  Their riflemen would follow an officer about all day with shots at 2200 yards; the day before they had hit Major Grant, of the Intelligence, as he was sketching the country.  Tommy, on the other hand, could swagger along the sky-line unmolested.  No doubt the Boers thought that exposed Caesar’s Camp lay within their hands.

But they were very wrong.  Snug behind their schanzes, the Manchesters cared as much for shells as for butterflies.  Most of them were posted on the inner edge of the flat top with a quarter of a mile of naked veldt to fire across.  They had been reinforced the day before by a field battery and a squadron and a half of the Light Horse.  And they had one schanze on the outer edge of the hill as an advanced post.

In the dim of dawn, the officer in charge of this post saw the Boers creeping down behind a stone wall to the left, gathering in the bottom, advancing in, for them, close order.  He welted them with rifle-fire:  they scattered and scurried back.

The guns got to work, silenced the field-guns on Flat Top Hill, and added scatter and scurry to the assailing riflemen.  Certainly some number were killed; half-a-dozen bodies, they said, lay in the open all day; lanterns moved to and fro among the rocks and bushes all night; a new field hospital and graveyard were opened next day at Bester’s Station.  On the other horn of our position the Devons had a brisk morning.  They had in most places at least a mile of clear ground in front of them.  But beyond that, and approaching within a few hundred yards of the extreme horn of the position, is scrub, which ought to have been cut down.

Out of this scrub the enemy began to snipe.  We had there, tucked into folds of the hills, a couple of tubby old black-powdered howitzers, and they let fly three rounds which should have been very effective.  But the black powder gave away their position in a moment, and from every side—­Pepworth’s, Lombard’s Nek, Bulwan—­came spouting inquirers to see who made that noise.  The Lord Mayor’s show was a fool to that display of infernal fireworks.  The pompon added his bark, but he has never yet bitten anybody:  him the Devons despise, and have christened with a coarse name.  They weathered the storm without a man touched.

Not a point had the Boers gained.  And then came twelve o’clock, and, if the Boers had fixed the date of the 9th of November, so had we.  We had it in mind whose birthday it was.  A trumpet-major went forth, and presently, golden-tongued, rang out, “God bless the Prince of Wales.”  The general up at Cove Redoubt led the cheers.  The sailors’ champagne, like their shells, is being saved for Christmas, but there was no stint of it to drink the Prince’s health withal.  And then the Royal salute—­bang on bang on bang—­twenty-one shotted guns, as quick as the quickfirer can fire, plump into the enemy.