But the Boers were only temporarily dislodged.  Their long range guns very soon shelled the station from the neighbouring kopjes with deadly effect.  French was compelled to withdraw.  The stupidity of the enemy, in leaving the telegraph wires uncut, enabled him immediately to acquaint Sir George White with the peril of his situation.  White’s orders were emphatic:  “The enemy must be beaten and driven off.  Time of great importance.”  The necessary reinforcements were hurried to the spot.

[Page Heading:  IN HIS ELEMENT]

French did not wait for their arrival before striking at the enemy.  The Light Horse, under Colonel Scott Chisholme, quickly took possession of a low ridge near the railway station, which fronted the main line of the enemy’s kopjes.  While he held this ridge French had the satisfaction of seeing infantry, cavalry and artillery coming up the railway line to his assistance.  In the late afternoon his force numbered something like three thousand five hundred men, outnumbering the enemy by more than two to one.

Those who ask why so many men were required, do not understand the position in which the British force found itself.  The enemy were entrenched on a series of high, boulder-strewn tablelands, which offered almost perfect cover.  Between these tablelands and French’s force lay a wide and partly scrubless stretch of veldt.  Over that terrible exposed slope his men must go, before they could come within useful range of the enemy.  French was faced with a most perilous and difficult enterprise.  However, that is precisely what French likes.  He rose to the situation with ready resource.  It was not easy to locate the exact position of the enemy ensconced amid these covering hills.  So in the afternoon he ordered a simultaneous frontal and flank attack.  Just which was front and which was flank it was for his lieutenants to discover.  Sir Ian Hamilton’s instructions to the infantry were brief but decisive.  “The enemy are there,” he said, “and I hope you will shift them out before sunset—­in fact, I know you will.”

When the action had fairly commenced, Sir George White and his staff galloped over from Ladysmith.  French approached, saluted, and asked for instructions.  The chivalrous White’s only reply was, “Go on, French; this is your show.”  All the afternoon he stayed on the field, watching the progress of events, and approving French’s dispositions.

The battle proved to be, in many ways, one of the most spectacular in history.  For as the infantry advanced, under a steady hail of shell and bullets, the sky began to darken.  The Boer positions stood silhouetted by stray puffs of white smoke against a lowering cumulus of clouds.  While the artillery on both sides shook the ground with an inferno of sound, the storm burst.  The thunder of the heavens became a spasmodic chorus to the roar of the guns.  One correspondent has described how he found himself mechanically humming the “Ride of the Valkyries”