in the one word ‘fey.’  The hand of coming death may already have lain cold upon his soul.  Out there, close beside him, stretched the long trench, fringed with its line of fierce, staring, eager faces, and its bristle of gun-barrels.  They knew he was coming.  They were ready.  They were waiting.  But still, with the dull murmur of many feet, the dense column, nearly four thousand strong, wandered onwards through the rain and the darkness, death and mutilation crouching upon their path.

It matters not what gave the signal, whether it was the flashing of a lantern by a Boer scout, or the tripping of a soldier over wire, or the firing of a gun in the ranks.  It may have been any, or it may have been none, of these things.  As a matter of fact I have been assured by a Boer who was present that it was the sound of the tins attached to the alarm wires which disturbed them.  However this may be, in an instant there crashed out of the darkness into their faces and ears a roar of point-blank fire, and the night was slashed across with the throbbing flame of the rifles.  At the moment before this outflame some doubt as to their whereabouts seems to have flashed across the mind of their leaders.  The order to extend had just been given, but the men had not had time to act upon it.  The storm of lead burst upon the head and right flank of the column, which broke to pieces under the murderous volley.  Wauchope was shot, struggled up, and fell once more for ever.  Rumour has placed words of reproach upon his dying lips, but his nature, both gentle and soldierly, forbids the supposition.  ’What a pity!’ was the only utterance which a brother Highlander ascribes to him.  Men went down in swathes, and a howl of rage and agony, heard afar over the veld, swelled up from the frantic and struggling crowd.  By the hundred they dropped—­some dead, some wounded, some knocked down by the rush and sway of the broken ranks.  It was a horrible business.  At such a range and in such a formation a single Mauser bullet may well pass through many men.  A few dashed forwards, and were found dead at the very edges of the trench.  The few survivors of companies A, B, and C of the Black Watch appear to have never actually retired, but to have clung on to the immediate front of the Boer trenches, while the remains of the other five companies tried to turn the Boer flank.  Of the former body only six got away unhurt in the evening after lying all day within two hundred yards of the enemy.  The rest of the brigade broke and, disentangling themselves with difficulty from the dead and the dying, fled back out of that accursed place.  Some, the most unfortunate of all, became caught in the darkness in the wire defences, and were found in the morning hung up ‘like crows,’ as one spectator describes it, and riddled with bullets.