The dark Cronje still waited reflective in the hotel garden.  Across the veld streamed the lines of infantry, the poor fellows eager, after seven miles of that upland air, for the breakfast which had been promised them.  It was a quarter to seven when our patrols of Lancers were fired upon.  There were Boers, then, between them and their meal!  The artillery was ordered up, the Guards were sent forward on the right, the 9th Brigade under Pole-Carew on the left, including the newly arrived Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.  They swept onwards into the fatal fire zone—­and then, and only then, there blazed out upon them four miles of rifles, cannon, and machine guns, and they realised, from general to private, that they had walked unwittingly into the fiercest battle yet fought in the war.

Before the position was understood the Guards were within seven hundred yards of the Boer trenches, and the other troops about nine hundred, on the side of a very gentle slope which made it most difficult to find any cover.  In front of them lay a serene landscape, the river, the houses, the hotel, no movement of men, no smoke—­everything peaceful and deserted save for an occasional quick flash and sparkle of flame.  But the noise was horrible and appalling.  Men whose nerves had been steeled to the crash of the big guns, or the monotonous roar of Maxims and the rattle of Mauser fire, found a new terror in the malignant ‘ploop-plooping’ of the automatic quick-firer.  The Maxim of the Scots Guards was caught in the hell-blizzard from this thing—­each shell no bigger than a large walnut, but flying in strings of a score—­and men and gun were destroyed in an instant.  As to the rifle bullets the air was humming and throbbing with them, and the sand was mottled like a pond in a shower.  To advance was impossible, to retire was hateful.  The men fell upon their faces and huddled close to the earth, too happy if some friendly ant-heap gave them a precarious shelter.  And always, tier above tier, the lines of rifle fire rippled and palpitated in front of them.  The infantry fired also, and fired, and fired—­but what was there to fire at?  An occasional eye and hand over the edge of a trench or behind a stone is no mark at seven hundred yards.  It would be instructive to know how many British bullets found a billet that day.

The cavalry was useless, the infantry was powerless—­there only remained the guns.  When any arm is helpless and harried it always casts an imploring eye upon the guns, and rarely indeed is it that the gallant guns do not respond.  Now the 75th and 18th Field Batteries came rattling and dashing to the front, and unlimbered at one thousand yards.  The naval guns were working at four thousand, but the two combined were insufficient to master the fire of the pieces of large calibre which were opposed to them.  Lord Methuen must have prayed for guns as Wellington did for night, and never was a prayer answered more dramatically.