ashing hand-mirror. The swords have been left at the base, or coated
deep with mud, so that they shall not flash, and with this column every
one, under the rank of general, carries a rifle on purpose to disguise
the fact that he is entitled to carry a sword. The kopje is the central
station of the system. From its uncomfortable eminence the commanding
general watches the developments of his attack, and directs it by
heliograph and ragged bits of bunting. A sweating, dirty Tommy turns his
back on a hill a mile away and slaps the air with his signal flag;
another Tommy, with the front visor of his helmet cocked over the back of
his neck, watches an answering bit of bunting through a glass. The bit
of bunting, a mile away, flashes impatiently, once to the right and once
to the left, and the Tommy with the glass says, "They understand, sir,"
and the other Tommy, who has not as yet cast even an interested glance at
the regiment he has ordered into action, folds his flag and curls up
against a hot rock and instantly sleeps.

Stuck on the crest, twenty feet from where General Buller is seated, are
two iron rods, like those in the putting-green of a golf course. They
mark the line of direction which a shell must take, in order to seek out
the enemy. Back of the kopje, where they cannot see the enemy, where
they cannot even see the hill upon which he is intrenched, are the
howitzers. Their duty is to aim at the iron rods, and vary their aim to
either side of them as they are directed to do by an officer on the
crest. Their shells pass a few yards over the heads of the staff, but
the staff has confidence. Those three yards are as safe a margin as a
hundred. Their confidence is that of the lady in spangles at a
music-hall, who permits her husband in buckskin to shoot apples from the
top of her head. From the other direction come the shells of the Boers,
seeking out the hidden howitzers. They pass somewhat higher, crashing
into the base of the kopje, sometimes killing, sometimes digging their
own ignominious graves. The staff regard them with the same
indifference. One of them tears the overcoat upon which Colonel
Stuart-Wortley is seated, another destroys his diary. His men, lying at
his feet among the red rocks, observe this with wide eyes. But he does
not shift his position. His answer is, that his men cannot shift theirs.

On Friday, February 23d, the Inniskillings, Dublins, and Connaughts were
sent out to tak