It may be that the Boers wished once for all to have done at all costs with the constant menace to their rear, or it may be that the deliberate preparations of Buller for his second advance had alarmed them, and that they realised that they must act quickly if they were to act at all.  At any rate, early in the New Year a most determined attack was decided upon.  The storming party consisted of some hundreds of picked volunteers from the Heidelberg (Transvaal) and Harrismith (Free State) contingents, led by de Villiers.  They were supported by several thousand riflemen, who might secure their success or cover their retreat.  Eighteen heavy guns had been trained upon the long ridge, one end of which has been called Caesar’s Camp and the other Waggon Hill.  This hill, three miles long, lay to the south of the town, and the Boers had early recognised it as being the most vulnerable point, for it was against it that their attack of November 9th had been directed.  Now, after two months, they were about to renew the attempt with greater resolution against less robust opponents.  At twelve o’clock our scouts heard the sounds of the chanting of hymns in the Boer camps.  At two in the morning crowds of barefooted men were clustering round the base of the ridge, and threading their way, rifle in hand, among the mimosa-bushes and scattered boulders which cover the slope of the hill.  Some working parties were moving guns into position, and the noise of their labour helped to drown the sound of the Boer advance.  Both at Caesar’s Camp, the east end of the ridge, and at Waggon Hill, the west end (the points being, I repeat, three miles apart), the attack came as a complete surprise.  The outposts were shot or driven in, and the stormers were on the ridge almost as soon as their presence was detected.  The line of rocks blazed with the flash of their guns.

Caesar’s Camp was garrisoned by one sturdy regiment, the Manchesters, aided by a Colt automatic gun.  The defence had been arranged in the form of small sangars, each held by from ten to twenty men.  Some few of these were rushed in the darkness, but the Lancashire men pulled themselves together and held on strenuously to those which remained.  The crash of musketry woke the sleeping town, and the streets resounded with the shouting of the officers and the rattling of arms as the men mustered in the darkness and hurried to the points of danger.

Three companies of the Gordons had been left near Caesar’s Camp, and these, under Captain Carnegie, threw themselves into the struggle.  Four other companies of Gordons came up in support from the town, losing upon the way their splendid colonel, Dick-Cunyngham, who was killed by a chance shot at three thousand yards, on this his first appearance since he had recovered from his wounds at Elandslaagte.  Later four companies of the Rifle Brigade were thrown into the firing line, and a total of two and a half infantry battalions held that end of the position.  It was not a man