The enemy being observed to have a gun upon a hill within striking distance of Estcourt, this force set out on November 22nd to make a night attack and to endeavour to capture it.  The hill was taken without difficulty, but it was found that the gun had been removed.  A severe counter-attack was made at daylight by the Boers, and the troops were compelled with no great loss and less glory to return to the town.  The Surreys and the Yorkshires behaved very well, but were placed in a difficult position and were badly supported by the artillery.  Martyn’s Mounted Infantry covered the retirement with great gallantry, but the skirmish ended in a British loss of fourteen killed and fifty wounded or missing, which was certainly more than that of the Boers.  From this indecisive action of Willow Grange the Boer invasion receded until General Buller, coming to the front on November 27th, found that the enemy was once more occupying the line of the Tugela.  He himself moved up to Frere, where he devoted his time and energies to the collection of that force with which he was destined, after three failures, to make his way into Ladysmith.

One unexpected and little known result of the Boer expedition into Southern Natal was that their leader, the chivalrous Joubert, injured himself through his horse stumbling, and was physically incapacitated for the remainder of the campaign.  He returned almost immediately to Pretoria, leaving the command of the Tugela in the hands of Louis Botha.

Leaving Buller to organise his army at Frere, and the Boer commanders to draw their screen of formidable defences along the Tugela, we will return once more to the fortunes of the unhappy town round which the interest of the world, and possibly the destiny of the Empire, were centering.  It is very certain that had Ladysmith fallen, and twelve thousand British soldiers with a million pounds’ worth of stores fallen into the hands of the invaders, we should have been faced with the alternative of abandoning the struggle, or of reconquering South Africa from Cape Town northwards.  South Africa is the keystone of the Empire, and for the instant Ladysmith was the keystone of South Africa.  But the courage of the troops who held the shell-torn townlet, and the confidence of the public who watched them, never faltered for an instant.

December 8th was marked by a gallant exploit on the part of the beleaguered garrison.  Not a whisper had transpired of the coming sortie, and a quarter of an hour before the start officers engaged had no idea of it.  O si sic omnia!  At ten o’clock a band of men slipped out of the town.  There were six hundred of them, all irregulars, drawn from the Imperial Light Horse, the Natal Carabineers, and the Border Mounted Rifles, under the command of Hunter, youngest and most dashing of British Generals.  Edwardes and Boyston were the subcommanders.  The men had no knowledge of where they were going or what they had to do, but they crept silently along