too much.  With the dawn of day it could be seen that the Boers held the southern and we the northern slopes, while the narrow plateau between formed a bloody debatable ground.  Along a front of a quarter of a mile fierce eyes glared and rifle barrels flashed from behind every rock, and the long fight swayed a little back or a little forward with each upward heave of the stormers or rally of the soldiers.  For hours the combatants were so near that a stone or a taunt could be thrown from one to the other.  Some scattered sangars still held their own, though the Boers had passed them.  One such, manned by fourteen privates of the Manchester Regiment, remained untaken, but had only two defenders left at the end of the bloody day.

With the coming of the light the 53rd Field Battery, the one which had already done so admirably at Lombard’s Kop, again deserved well of its country.  It was impossible to get behind the Boers and fire straight at their position, so every shell fired had to skim over the heads of our own men upon the ridge and so pitch upon the reverse slope.  Yet so accurate was the fire, carried on under an incessant rain of shells from the big Dutch gun on Bulwana, that not one shot miscarried and that Major Abdy and his men succeeded in sweeping the further slope without loss to our own fighting line.  Exactly the same feat was equally well performed at the other end of the position by Major Blewitt’s 21st Battery, which was exposed to an even more searching fire than the 53rd.  Any one who has seen the iron endurance of British gunners and marvelled at the answering shot which flashes out through the very dust of the enemy’s exploding shell, will understand how fine must have been the spectacle of these two batteries working in the open, with the ground round them sharded with splinters.  Eye-witnesses have left it upon record that the sight of Major Blewitt strolling up and down among his guns, and turning over with his toe the last fallen section of iron, was one of the most vivid and stirring impressions which they carried from the fight.  Here also it was that the gallant Sergeant Bosley, his arm and his leg stricken off by a Boer shell, cried to his comrades to roll his body off the trail and go on working the gun.

At the same time as—­or rather earlier than—­the onslaught upon Caesar’s Camp a similar attack had been made with secrecy and determination upon the western end of the position called Waggon Hill.  The barefooted Boers burst suddenly with a roll of rifle-fire into the little garrison of Imperial Light Horse and Sappers who held the position.  Mathias of the former, Digby-Jones and Dennis of the latter, showed that ‘two in the morning’ courage which Napoleon rated as the highest of military virtues.  They and their men were surprised but not disconcerted, and stood desperately to a slogging match at the closest quarters.  Seventeen Sappers were down out of thirty, and more than half the little body of irregulars.