enormous quantities of munitions and stock.  The success of these operations was due, not only to the energy of Benson and his men, but to the untiring exertions of Colonel Wools-Sampson, who acted as intelligence officer.  If, during his long persecution by President Kruger, Wools-Sampson in the bitterness of his heart had vowed a feud against the Boer cause, it must be acknowledged that he has most amply fulfilled it, for it would be difficult to point to any single man who has from first to last done them greater harm.

In October Colonel Benson’s force was reorganised, and it then consisted of the 2nd Buffs, the 2nd Scottish Horse, the 3rd and 25th Mounted Infantry, and four guns of the 84th battery.  With this force, numbering nineteen hundred men, he left Middelburg upon the Delagoa line on October 20th and proceeded south, crossing the course along which the Boers, who were retiring from their abortive raid into Natal, might be expected to come.  For several days the column performed its familiar work, and gathered up forty or fifty prisoners.  On the 26th came news that the Boer commandos under Grobler were concentrating against it, and that an attack in force might be expected.  For two days there was continuous sniping, and the column as it moved through the country saw Boer horsemen keeping pace with it on the far flanks and in the rear.  The weather had been very bad, and it was in a deluge of cold driving rain that the British set forth upon October 30th, moving towards Brakenlaagte, which is a point about forty miles due south of Middelburg.  It was Benson’s intention to return to his base.

About midday the column, still escorted by large bodies of aggressive Boers, came to a difficult spruit swollen by the rain.  Here the wagons stuck, and it took some hours to get them all across.  The Boer fire was continually becoming more severe, and had broken out at the head of the column as well as the rear.  The situation was rendered more difficult by the violence of the rain, which raised a thick steam from the ground and made it impossible to see for any distance.  Major Anley, in command of the rearguard, peering back, saw through a rift of the clouds a large body of horsemen in extended order sweeping after them.  ’There’s miles of them, begob!’ cried an excited Irish trooper.  Next instant the curtain had closed once more, but all who had caught a glimpse of that vision knew that a stern struggle was at hand.

At this moment two guns of the 84th battery under Major Guinness were in action against Boer riflemen.  As a rear screen on the farther side of the guns was a body of the Scottish Horse and of the Yorkshire Mounted Infantry.  Near the guns themselves were thirty men of the Buffs.  The rest of the Buffs and of the Mounted Infantry were out upon the flanks or else were with the advance guard, which was now engaged, under the direction of Colonel Wools-Sampson, in parking the convoy and in forming the camp.  These troops played a small part in the day’s fighting, the whole force of which broke with irresistible violence upon the few hundred men who were in front of or around the rear guns.  Colonel Benson seems to have just ridden back to the danger point when the Boers delivered their furious attack.