honours of the assault, however, must be awarded to the sailors and marines of the Naval Brigade, who underwent such an ordeal as men have seldom faced and yet come out as victors.  To them fell the task of carrying that formidable hill which had been so scourged by our artillery.  With a grand rush they swept up the slope, but were met by a horrible fire.  Every rock spurted flame, and the front ranks withered away before the storm of the Mauser.  An eye-witness has recorded that the brigade was hardly visible amid the sand knocked up by the bullets.  For an instant they fell back into cover, and then, having taken their breath, up they went again, with a deep-chested sailor roar.  There were but four hundred in all, two hundred seamen and two hundred marines, and the losses in that rapid rush were terrible.  Yet they swarmed up, their gallant officers, some of them little boy-middies, cheering them on.  Ethelston, the commander of the ‘Powerful,’ was struck down.  Plumbe and Senior of the Marines were killed.  Captain Prothero of the ‘Doris’ dropped while still yelling to his seamen to ’take that kopje and be hanged to it!’ Little Huddart, the middy, died a death which is worth many inglorious years.  Jones of the Marines fell wounded, but rose again and rushed on with his men.  It was on these gallant marines, the men who are ready to fight anywhere and anyhow, moist or dry, that the heaviest loss fell.  When at last they made good their foothold upon the crest of that murderous hill they had left behind them three officers and eighty-eight men out of a total of 206—­a loss within a few minutes of nearly 50 per cent.  The bluejackets, helped by the curve of the hill, got off with a toll of eighteen of their number.  Half the total British losses of the action fell upon this little body of men, who upheld most gloriously the honour and reputation of the service from which they were drawn.  With such men under the white ensign we leave our island homes in safety behind us.

The battle of Enslin had cost us some two hundred of killed and wounded, and beyond the mere fact that we had cleared our way by another stage towards Kimberley it is difficult to say what advantage we had from it.  We won the kopjes, but we lost our men.  The Boer killed and wounded were probably less than half of our own, and the exhaustion and weakness of our cavalry forbade us to pursue and prevented us from capturing their guns.  In three days the men had fought two exhausting actions in a waterless country and under a tropical sun.  Their exertions had been great and yet were barren of result.  Why this should be so was naturally the subject of keen discussion both in the camp and among the public at home.  It always came back to Lord Methuen’s own complaint about the absence of cavalry and of horse artillery.  Many very unjust charges have been hurled against our War Office—­a department which in some matters has done extraordinarily and unexpectedly well—­but in this question of the delay in the despatch of our cavalry and artillery, knowing as we did the extreme mobility of our enemy, there is certainly ground for an inquiry.