mud and with blood, came the Boer reserves, and
up the northern slope came our own reserve, the Devon Regiment, fit
representatives of that virile county. Admirably led by Park, their
gallant Colonel, the Devons swept the Boers before them, and the Rifles,
Gordons, and Light Horse joined in the wild charge which finally cleared
the ridge.

But the end was not yet. The Boer had taken a risk over this venture,
and now he had to pay the stakes. Down the hill he passed, crouching,
darting, but the spruits behind him were turned into swirling streams,
and as he hesitated for an instant upon the brink the relentless sleet
of bullets came from behind. Many were swept away down the gorges and
into the Klip River, never again to be accounted for in the lists of
their field-cornet. The majority splashed through, found their horses
in their shelter, and galloped off across the great Bulwana Plain, as
fairly beaten in as fair a fight as ever brave men were yet.

The cheers of victory as the Devons swept the ridge had heartened the
weary men upon Caesar's Camp to a similar effort. Manchesters, Gordons,
and Rifles, aided by the fire of two batteries, cleared the long-debated
position. Wet, cold, weary, and without food for twenty-six hours, the
bedraggled Tommies stood yelling and waving, amid the litter of dead and
of dying.

It was a near thing. Had the ridge fallen the town must have followed,
and history perhaps have been changed. In the old stiff-rank Majuba days
we should have been swept in an hour from the position. But the wily man
behind the rock was now to find an equally wily man in front of him.
The soldier had at last learned something of the craft of the hunter. He
clung to his shelter, he dwelled on his aim, he ignored his dressings,
he laid aside the eighteenth-century traditions of his pigtailed
ancestor, and he hit the Boers harder than they had been hit yet. No
return may ever come to us of their losses on that occasion; 80 dead
bodies were returned to them from the ridge alone, while the slopes,
the dongas, and the river each had its own separate tale. No possible
estimate can make it less than three hundred killed and wounded, while
many place it at a much higher figure. Our own casualties were very
serious and the proportion of dead to wounded unusually high, owing to
the fact that the greater part of the wounds were necessarily of the
head. In killed we lost 13 officers, 135 men. In wounded 28 officers,
244