were themselves
invisible while their enemies were silhouetted against the light.
Creeping up between the pickets, the Boers were not seen until they
opened fire at point-blank range upon the sleeping men. The rifles were
stacked--another noxious military tradition--and many of the troopers
were shot down while they rushed for their weapons. Surprised out of
their sleep and unable to distinguish their antagonists, the brave
Australians did as well as any troops could have done who were placed in
so impossible a position. Captain Watson, the officer in charge of the
pom-poms, was shot down, and it proved to be impossible to bring the
guns into action. Within five minutes the Victorians had lost twenty
killed and forty wounded, when the survivors surrendered. It is
pleasant to add that they were very well treated by the victors, but
the high-spirited colonials felt their reverse most bitterly. 'It is the
worst thing that ever happened to Australia!' says one in the letter in
which he describes it. The actual number of Boers who rushed the camp
was only 180, but 400 more had formed a cordon round it. To Viljoen and
his lieutenant Muller great credit must be given for this well-managed
affair, which gave them a fresh supply of stores and clothing at a time
when they were hard pressed for both. These same Boer officers had
led the attack upon Helvetia where the 4.7 gun was taken. The
victors succeeded in getting away with all their trophies, and having
temporarily taken one of the blockhouses on the railway near Brugspruit,
they crossed the line in safety and returned, as already said, to their
old quarters in the north, which had been harried but not denuded by the
operations of General Blood.

It would take a volume to catalogue, and a library to entirely describe
the movements and doings of the very large number of British columns
which operated over the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony during
this cold-weather campaign. If the same columns and the same leaders
were consistently working in the same districts, some system of
narrative might enable the reader to follow their fortunes, but they
were, as a matter of fact, rapidly transferred from one side of the
field of action to another in accordance with the concentrations of the
enemy. The total number of columns amounted to at least sixty, which
varied in number from two hundred to two thousand, and seldom hunted
alone. Could their movements be marked in red upon a