e a trench, half-way up Railway Hill. The attack was one
of those frontal attacks, which in this war, against the new weapons,
have added so much to the lists of killed and wounded and to the prestige
of the men, while it has, in an inverse ratio, hurt the prestige of the
men by whom the attack was ordered. The result of this attack was
peculiarly disastrous. It was made at night, and as soon as it
developed, the Boers retreated to the trenches on the crest of the hill,
and threw men around the sides to bring a cross-fire to bear on the
Englishmen. In the morning the Inniskillings found they had lost four
hundred men, and ten out of their fifteen officers. The other regiments
lost as heavily. The following Tuesday, which was the anniversary of
Majuba Hill, three brigades, instead of a regiment, were told off to take
this same Railway Hill, or Pieter's, as it was later called, on the
flank, and with it to capture two others. On the same day, nineteen
years before, the English had lost Majuba Hill, and their hope was to
take these three from the Boers for the one they had lost, and open the
way to Bulwana Mountain, which was the last bar that held them back from
Ladysmith.

The first two of the three hills they wanted were shoulder to shoulder,
the third was separated from them by a deep ravine. This last was the
highest, and in order that the attack should be successful, it was
necessary to seize it first. The hills stretched for three miles; they
were about one thousand two hundred yards high.

For three hours a single line of men slipped and stumbled forward along
the muddy bank of the river, and for three hours the artillery crashed,
spluttered, and stabbed at the three hills above them, scattering the
rocks and bursting over and behind the Boer trenches on the crest.

As is their custom, the Boers remained invisible and made no reply. And
though we knew they were there, it seemed inconceivable that anything
human could live under such a bombardment of shot, bullets, and shrapnel.
A hundred yards distant, on our right, the navy guns were firing lyddite
that burst with a thick yellow smoke; on the other side Colt automatics
were put-put-put-ing a stream of bullets; the field-guns and the
howitzers were playing from a hill half a mile behind us, and scattered
among the rocks about us, and for two miles on either hand, the infantry
in reserve were firing off ammunition at any part of the three hills they
happ