utilating others in their frantic struggles.
One driver, crazed with horror, sprang on a leader, cut the traces and
tore madly off the field. But a perfect discipline reigned among the
vast majority of the gunners, and the words of command and the laying
and working of the guns were all as methodical as at Okehampton. Not
only was there a most deadly rifle fire, partly from the lines in front
and partly from the village of Colenso upon their left flank, but the
Boer automatic quick-firers found the range to a nicety, and the little
shells were crackling and banging continually over the batteries.
Already every gun had its litter of dead around it, but each was still
fringed by its own group of furious officers and sweating desperate
gunners. Poor Long was down, with a bullet through his arm and another
through his liver. 'Abandon be damned! We don't abandon guns!' was his
last cry as they dragged him into the shelter of a little donga hard by.
Captain Goldie dropped dead. So did Lieutenant Schreiber. Colonel Hunt
fell, shot in two places. Officers and men were falling fast. The guns
could not be worked, and yet they could not be removed, for every effort
to bring up teams from the shelter where the limbers lay ended in the
death of the horses. The survivors took refuge from the murderous fire
in that small hollow to which Long had been carried, a hundred yards
or so from the line of bullet-splashed cannon. One gun on the right was
still served by four men who refused to leave it. They seemed to bear
charmed lives, these four, as they strained and wrestled with their
beloved 15-pounder, amid the spurting sand and the blue wreaths of the
bursting shells. Then one gasped and fell against the trail, and his
comrade sank beside the wheel with his chin upon his breast. The
third threw up his hands and pitched forward upon his face; while the
survivor, a grim powder-stained figure, stood at attention looking death
in the eyes until he too was struck down. A useless sacrifice, you may
say; but while the men who saw them die can tell such a story round the
camp fire the example of such deaths as these does more than clang of
bugle or roll of drum to stir the warrior spirit of our race.

For two hours the little knot of heart-sick humiliated officers and
men lay in the precarious shelter of the donga and looked out at the
bullet-swept plain and the line of silent guns. Many of them were
wounded. Their chief lay among them, still c