yards, can be easily understood, but the urgency demanding any sacrifice of life, provided that end were attained, suggests many possibilities, and gives to Saturday’s fight exceptional significance as a probable turning-point in the Natal Campaign, which has hitherto gone in favour of our foes, notwithstanding the victories we have gained over them in isolated actions.  Dundee and Elandslaagte, like Lord Methuen’s fights on the Modder River, added lustre to our army, by showing what British soldiers can do in assaulting positions against the terrific fire from modern magazine rifles, but it cannot be said that we have profited by them while our enemies are able to keep us here cut off from all communications except by heliograph or search-light signals, and have yet force enough to interpose a formidable line of resistance between Ladysmith and Sir Redvers Buller’s column.

There cannot be many Boers in any position surrounding this place, but their mobility gives them the power of concentrating quickly at any point that might be threatened, and this for all practical purposes increases their numbers threefold.  As Colonel F. Rhodes put it in one of his quaintly appropriate phrases, “We are a victorious army besieged by an inferior enemy.”  But there are Boers in twice our own strength near at hand, if, not actually all in the investing lines.  The Tugela Heights are scarcely twelve miles off as the crow flies, and this distance might be covered by a Boer commando in less than two hours, so that a thousand men or more moving from one of our enemy’s columns to another, could be brought into a fight in time to turn the tide against either Ladysmith or its relieving force as occasion might prompt.  For attacking a particular point this mobility would give enormous advantages if the Boers only knew how to make full use of them, and carried arms on which they could rely for hand-to-hand fighting, in the critical moment of pushing an attack home.

As it is they trust to tactics that have stood them well in previous campaigns against British soldiers and natives, their object being to gain some commanding position, whence, without being seen, they may pour a deadly fire on their astonished foes, and thus cause a panic retreat that might be turned into a disorderly rout by a sudden rush of reinforcing Boers or a terrific storm of bullets from several quarters at once.  Reasoning from experience they hope to make history repeat itself in another Majuba Hill.  One would have thought that the fights at Elandslaagte and Dundee would dispel delusions of that kind based on the assumption that Tommy Atkins will not stand up against rifle bullets at short range from Boers whom he cannot see if they but steal upon him and open fire where he least expects to find them.