Before evening fell a most gallant and successful attempt had been made by the third battalion of the King’s Royal Rifles from Lyttelton’s Brigade to relieve the pressure upon their comrades on Spion Kop.  In order to draw part of the Boer fire away they ascended from the northern side and carried the hills which formed a continuation of the same ridge.  The movement was meant to be no more than a strong demonstration, but the riflemen pushed it until, breathless but victorious, they stood upon the very crest of the position, leaving nearly a hundred dead or dying to show the path which they had taken.  Their advance being much further than was desired, they were recalled, and it was at the moment that Buchanan Riddell, their brave Colonel, stood up to read Lyttelton’s note that he fell with a Boer bullet through his brain, making one more of those gallant leaders who died as they had lived, at the head of their regiments.  Chisholm, Dick-Cunyngham, Downman, Wilford, Gunning, Sherston, Thackeray, Sitwell, MacCarthy O’Leary, Airlie—­they have led their men up to and through the gates of death.  It was a fine exploit of the 3rd Rifles.  ’A finer bit of skirmishing, a finer bit of climbing, and a finer bit of fighting, I have never seen,’ said their Brigadier.  It is certain that if Lyttelton had not thrown his two regiments into the fight the pressure upon the hill-top might have become unendurable; and it seems also certain that if he had only held on to the position which the Rifles had gained, the Boers would never have reoccupied Spion Kop.

And now, under the shadow of night, but with the shells bursting thickly over the plateau, the much-tried Thorneycroft had to make up his mind whether he should hold on for another such day as he had endured, or whether now, in the friendly darkness, he should remove his shattered force.  Could he have seen the discouragement of the Boers and the preparations which they had made for retirement, he would have held his ground.  But this was hidden from him, while the horror of his own losses was but too apparent.  Forty per cent of his men were down.  Thirteen hundred dead and dying are a grim sight upon a wide-spread battle-field, but when this number is heaped upon a confined space, where from a single high rock the whole litter of broken and shattered bodies can be seen, and the groans of the stricken rise in one long droning chorus to the ear, then it is an iron mind indeed which can resist such evidence of disaster.  In a harder age Wellington was able to survey four thousand bodies piled in the narrow compass of the breach of Badajos, but his resolution was sustained by the knowledge that the military end for which they fell had been accomplished.  Had his task been unfinished it is doubtful whether even his steadfast soul would not have flinched from its completion.  Thorneycroft saw the frightful havoc of one day, and he shrank from the thought of such another.  ’Better six battalions safely