but the Boer automatic quick-firers found the range to a nicety, and the little shells were crackling and banging continually over the batteries.  Already every gun had its litter of dead around it, but each was still fringed by its own group of furious officers and sweating desperate gunners.  Poor Long was down, with a bullet through his arm and another through his liver.  ’Abandon be damned!  We don’t abandon guns!’ was his last cry as they dragged him into the shelter of a little donga hard by.  Captain Goldie dropped dead.  So did Lieutenant Schreiber.  Colonel Hunt fell, shot in two places.  Officers and men were falling fast.  The guns could not be worked, and yet they could not be removed, for every effort to bring up teams from the shelter where the limbers lay ended in the death of the horses.  The survivors took refuge from the murderous fire in that small hollow to which Long had been carried, a hundred yards or so from the line of bullet-splashed cannon.  One gun on the right was still served by four men who refused to leave it.  They seemed to bear charmed lives, these four, as they strained and wrestled with their beloved 15-pounder, amid the spurting sand and the blue wreaths of the bursting shells.  Then one gasped and fell against the trail, and his comrade sank beside the wheel with his chin upon his breast.  The third threw up his hands and pitched forward upon his face; while the survivor, a grim powder-stained figure, stood at attention looking death in the eyes until he too was struck down.  A useless sacrifice, you may say; but while the men who saw them die can tell such a story round the camp fire the example of such deaths as these does more than clang of bugle or roll of drum to stir the warrior spirit of our race.

For two hours the little knot of heart-sick humiliated officers and men lay in the precarious shelter of the donga and looked out at the bullet-swept plain and the line of silent guns.  Many of them were wounded.  Their chief lay among them, still calling out in his delirium for his guns.  They had been joined by the gallant Baptie, a brave surgeon, who rode across to the donga amid a murderous fire, and did what he could for the injured men.  Now and then a rush was made into the open, sometimes in the hope of firing another round, sometimes to bring a wounded comrade in from the pitiless pelt of the bullets.  How fearful was that lead-storm may be gathered from the fact that one gunner was found with sixty-four wounds in his body.  Several men dropped in these sorties, and the disheartened survivors settled down once more in the donga.

The hope to which they clung was that their guns were not really lost, but that the arrival of infantry would enable them to work them once more.  Infantry did at last arrive, but in such small numbers that it made the situation more difficult instead of easing it.  Colonel Bullock had brought up two companies of the Devons to join the two companies (A and B) of Scots Fusiliers who had been the original escort of the guns, but such a handful could not turn the tide.  They also took refuge in the donga, and waited for better times.