But it was, it must be confessed, a Pyrrhic victory.  We had our hill, but what else had we?  The guns which had been silenced by our fire had been removed from the kopje.  The commando which seized the hill was that of Lucas Meyer, and it is computed that he had with him about 4000 men.  This figure includes those under the command of Erasmus, who made halfhearted demonstrations against the British flank.  If the shirkers be eliminated, it is probable that there were not more than a thousand actual combatants upon the hill.  Of this number about fifty were killed and a hundred wounded.  The British loss at Talana Hill itself was 41 killed and 180 wounded, but among the killed were many whom the army could ill spare.  The gallant but optimistic Symons, Gunning of the Rifles, Sherston, Connor, Hambro, and many other brave men died that day.  The loss of officers was out of all proportion to that of the men.

An incident which occurred immediately after the action did much to rob the British of the fruits of the victory.  Artillery had pushed up the moment that the hill was carried, and had unlimbered on Smith’s Nek between the two hills, from which the enemy, in broken groups of 50 and 100, could be seen streaming away.  A fairer chance for the use of shrapnel has never been.  But at this instant there ran from an old iron church on the reverse side of the hill, which had been used all day as a Boer hospital, a man with a white flag.  It is probable that the action was in good faith, and that it was simply intended to claim a protection for the ambulance party which followed him.  But the too confiding gunner in command appears to have thought that an armistice had been declared, and held his hand during those precious minutes which might have turned a defeat into a rout.  The chance passed, never to return.  The double error of firing into our own advance and of failing to fire into the enemy’s retreat makes the battle one which cannot be looked back to with satisfaction by our gunners.

In the meantime some miles away another train of events had led to a complete disaster to our small cavalry force—­a disaster which robbed our dearly bought infantry victory of much of its importance.  That action alone was undoubtedly a victorious one, but the net result of the day’s fighting cannot be said to have been certainly in our favour.  It was Wellington who asserted that his cavalry always got him into scrapes, and the whole of British military history might furnish examples of what he meant.  Here again our cavalry got into trouble.  Suffice it for the civilian to chronicle the fact, and leave it to the military critic to portion out the blame.