tish Horse, the 3rd and 25th Mounted
Infantry, and four guns of the 84th battery. With this force, numbering
nineteen hundred men, he left Middelburg upon the Delagoa line on
October 20th and proceeded south, crossing the course along which the
Boers, who were retiring from their abortive raid into Natal, might be
expected to come. For several days the column performed its familiar
work, and gathered up forty or fifty prisoners. On the 26th came news
that the Boer commandos under Grobler were concentrating against it,
and that an attack in force might be expected. For two days there was
continuous sniping, and the column as it moved through the country saw
Boer horsemen keeping pace with it on the far flanks and in the rear.
The weather had been very bad, and it was in a deluge of cold driving
rain that the British set forth upon October 30th, moving towards
Brakenlaagte, which is a point about forty miles due south of
Middelburg. It was Benson's intention to return to his base.

About midday the column, still escorted by large bodies of aggressive
Boers, came to a difficult spruit swollen by the rain. Here the wagons
stuck, and it took some hours to get them all across. The Boer fire was
continually becoming more severe, and had broken out at the head of the
column as well as the rear. The situation was rendered more difficult by
the violence of the rain, which raised a thick steam from the ground and
made it impossible to see for any distance. Major Anley, in command of
the rearguard, peering back, saw through a rift of the clouds a large
body of horsemen in extended order sweeping after them. 'There's miles
of them, begob!' cried an excited Irish trooper. Next instant the
curtain had closed once more, but all who had caught a glimpse of that
vision knew that a stern struggle was at hand.

At this moment two guns of the 84th battery under Major Guinness were
in action against Boer riflemen. As a rear screen on the farther side of
the guns was a body of the Scottish Horse and of the Yorkshire Mounted
Infantry. Near the guns themselves were thirty men of the Buffs. The
rest of the Buffs and of the Mounted Infantry were out upon the flanks
or else were with the advance guard, which was now engaged, under the
direction of Colonel Wools-Sampson, in parking the convoy and in forming
the camp. These troops played a small part in the day's fighting, the
whole force of which broke with irresistible violence upon the few
hundr