A world of light, of commendable trees, of grey grass flecked with flowers, of life having the supreme sense of a freedom which has known no check.  It is a life which cities have not spoiled, and where man is still in touch with the primeval friends of man; where the wildest beast and the newest babe of a woman have something in common.

Drink your fill of the sweet intoxicating air with eyes shut till the lungs are full and the heart beats with new fulness; then open them upon the wide sunrise and scan the veld so full of gracious odour.  Is it not good and glad?  And now face the hills rising nobly away there to the left, the memorable and friendly hills.  Is it not—­

Upon the morning has crept suddenly a black cloud, although the sun is shining brilliantly.  A moment before the dawn all was at peace on the veld and among the kopjes, and only the contented sighing of men and beasts broke the silence, or so it seemed; but with the glimmer of light along the horizon came a change so violent that all the circle of vision was in a quiver of trouble.  Affrighted birds, in fluttering bewilderment, swept and circled aimlessly through the air with strange, half-human cries; the jackal and the meerkat, the springbok and the rheebok, trembled where they stood, with heads uplifted, vaguely trying to realize the Thing which was breaking the peace of their world; useless horses which had been turned out of the armies of Boers and British galloped and stumbled and plunged into space in alarm; for they knew what was darkening the morning.  They had suffered the madness of battle, and they realized it at its native first value.

There was a battle forward on the left flank of the Boer Army.  Behind Hetmeyer’s Kopje were the horses of the men whom Rudyard Byng had brought to take a position and hold it till support came and this flank of the Farmer’s Army was turned; but the men themselves were at work on the kopjes—­the grim work of dislodging the voortrekker people from the places where they burrowed like conies among the rocks.

Just before dawn broke Byng’s men were rushing the outer trenches.  These they cleared with the wild cries of warriors whose blood was in a tempest.  Bayonets dripped red, rifles were fired at hand-to-hand range, men clubbed their guns and fought as men fought in the days when the only fighting was man to man, or one man to many men.  Here every “Boojer” and Rooinek was a champion.  The Boer fell back because he was forced back by men who were men of the veld like himself; and the Briton pressed forward because he would not be denied; because he was sick of reverses; of going forward and falling back; of taking a position with staggering loss and then abandoning it; of gaining a victory and then not following it up; of having the foe in the hollow of the hand and hesitating to close it with a death-grip; of promising relief to besieged men, and marking time when you had gained a foothold, instead of gaining a foothold farther on.