Through the long day the fight maintained its equilibrium along the summit of the ridge, swaying a little that way or this, but never amounting to a repulse of the stormers or to a rout of the defenders.  So intermixed were the combatants that a wounded man more than once found himself a rest for the rifles of his enemies.  One unfortunate soldier in this position received six more bullets from his own comrades in their efforts to reach the deadly rifleman behind him.  At four o’clock a huge bank of clouds which had towered upwards unheeded by the struggling men burst suddenly into a terrific thunderstorm with vivid lightnings and lashing rain.  It is curious that the British victory at Elandslaagte was heralded by just such another storm.  Up on the bullet-swept hill the long fringes of fighting men took no more heed of the elements than would two bulldogs who have each other by the throat.  Up the greasy hillside, foul with mud and with blood, came the Boer reserves, and up the northern slope came our own reserve, the Devon Regiment, fit representatives of that virile county.  Admirably led by Park, their gallant Colonel, the Devons swept the Boers before them, and the Rifles, Gordons, and Light Horse joined in the wild charge which finally cleared the ridge.

But the end was not yet.  The Boer had taken a risk over this venture, and now he had to pay the stakes.  Down the hill he passed, crouching, darting, but the spruits behind him were turned into swirling streams, and as he hesitated for an instant upon the brink the relentless sleet of bullets came from behind.  Many were swept away down the gorges and into the Klip River, never again to be accounted for in the lists of their field-cornet.  The majority splashed through, found their horses in their shelter, and galloped off across the great Bulwana Plain, as fairly beaten in as fair a fight as ever brave men were yet.

The cheers of victory as the Devons swept the ridge had heartened the weary men upon Caesar’s Camp to a similar effort.  Manchesters, Gordons, and Rifles, aided by the fire of two batteries, cleared the long-debated position.  Wet, cold, weary, and without food for twenty-six hours, the bedraggled Tommies stood yelling and waving, amid the litter of dead and of dying.

It was a near thing.  Had the ridge fallen the town must have followed, and history perhaps have been changed.  In the old stiff-rank Majuba days we should have been swept in an hour from the position.  But the wily man behind the rock was now to find an equally wily man in front of him.  The soldier had at last learned something of the craft of the hunter.  He clung to his shelter, he dwelled on his aim, he ignored his dressings, he laid aside the eighteenth-century traditions of his pigtailed ancestor, and he hit the Boers harder than they had been hit yet.  No return may ever come to us of their losses on that occasion; 80 dead bodies were returned to them from the ridge alone, while the slopes, the dongas,