Two miles beyond Roodeval station there is a well-marked kopje by the railway line, with other hills some distance to the right and the left.  A militia regiment, the 4th Derbyshire, had been sent up to occupy this post.  There were rumours of Boers on the line, and Major Haig, who with one thousand details of various regiments commanded at railhead, had been attacked on June 6th but had beaten off his assailants.  De Wet, acting sometimes in company with, and sometimes independently of, his lieutenant Nel, passed down the line looking fur some easier prey, and on the night of June 7th came upon the militia regiment, which was encamped in a position which could be completely commanded by artillery.  It is not true that they had neglected to occupy the kopje under which they lay, for two companies had been posted upon it.  But there seems to have been no thought of imminent danger, and the regiment had pitched its tents and gone very comfortably to sleep without a thought of the gentleman in the tinted glasses.  In the middle of the night he was upon them with a hissing sleet of bullets.  At the first dawn the guns opened and the shells began to burst among them.  It was a horrible ordeal for raw troops.  The men were miners and agricultural labourers, who had never seen more bloodshed than a cut finger in their lives.  They had been four months in the country, but their life had been a picnic, as the luxury of their baggage shows.  Now in an instant the picnic was ended, and in the grey cold dawn war was upon them—­grim war with the whine of bullets, the screams of pain, the crash of shell, the horrible rending and riving of body and limb.  In desperate straits, which would have tried the oldest soldiers, the brave miners did well.  They never from the beginning had a chance save to show how gamely they could take punishment, but that at least they did.  Bullets were coming from all sides at once and yet no enemy was visible.  They lined one side of the embankment, and they were shot in the back.  They lined the other, and were again shot in the back.  Baird-Douglas, the Colonel, vowed to shoot the man who should raise the white flag, and he fell dead himself before he saw the hated emblem.  But it had to come.  A hundred and forty of the men were down, many of them suffering from the horrible wounds which shell inflicts.  The place was a shambles.  Then the flag went up and the Boers at last became visible.  Outnumbered, outgeneralled, and without guns, there is no shadow of stain upon the good name of the one militia regiment which was ever seriously engaged during the war.  Their position was hopeless from the first, and they came out of it with death, mutilation, and honour.