’Practically all of them were dressed in khaki and had the water-bottles and haversacks of our soldiers.  One of them snatched a bayonet from a dead man, and was about to despatch one of our wounded when he was stopped in the nick of time by a man in a black suit, who, I afterwards heard, was De la Rey himself. . .The feature of the action was the incomparable heroism of our dear old Colonel Wools-Sampson.’  So wrote a survivor of B company, himself shot through the body.  It was four hours before a fresh British advance reoccupied the ridge, and by that time the Boers had disappeared.  Some seventy killed and wounded, many of them terribly mutilated, were found on the scene of the disaster.  It is certainly a singular coincidence that at distant points of the seat of war two of the crack irregular corps should have suffered so severely within three days of each other.  In each case, however, their prestige was enhanced rather than lowered by the result.  These incidents tend, however, to shake the belief that scouting is better performed in the Colonial than in the regular forces.

Of the Boer attacks upon British posts to which allusion has been made, that upon Belfast, in the early morning of January 7th, appears to have been very gallantly and even desperately pushed.  On the same date a number of smaller attacks, which may have been meant simply as diversions, were made upon Wonderfontein, Nooitgedacht, Wildfontein, Pan, Dalmanutha, and Machadodorp.  These seven separate attacks, occurring simultaneously over sixty miles, show that the Boer forces were still organised and under one effective control.  The general object of the operations was undoubtedly to cut Lord Roberts’s communications upon that side and to destroy a considerable section of the railway.

The town of Belfast was strongly held by Smith-Dorrien, with 1750 men, of which 1300 were infantry belonging to the Royal Irish, the Shropshires, and the Gordons.  The perimeter of defence, however, was fifteen miles, and each little fort too far from its neighbour for mutual support, though connected with headquarters by telephone.  It is probable that the leaders and burghers engaged in this very gallant attack were in part the same as those concerned in the successful attempt at Helvetia upon December 29th, for the assault was delivered in the same way, at the same hour, and apparently with the same primary object.  This was to gain possession of the big 5-inch gun, which is as helpless by night as it is formidable by day.  At Helvetia they attained their object and even succeeded not merely in destroying, but in removing their gigantic trophy.  At Belfast they would have performed the same feat had it not been for the foresight of General Smith-Dorrien, who had the heavy gun trundled back into the town every night.