g been sent up to reinforce
French. The attempt was met by a volley and a bayonet charge. Captain
Orr, of the Yorkshires, was struck down; but Captain Madocks, of the
New Zealanders, who behaved with conspicuous gallantry at a critical
instant, took command, and the enemy was heavily repulsed. Madocks
engaged in a point-blank rifle duel with the frock-coated top-hatted
Boer leader, and had the good fortune to kill his formidable opponent.
Twenty-one Boer dead and many wounded left upon the field made a small
set-off to the disaster of the Suffolks.

The next day, however (January 16th), the scales of fortune, which swung
alternately one way and the other, were again tipped against us. It
is difficult to give an intelligible account of the details of these
operations, because they were carried out by thin fringes of men
covering on both sides a very large area, each kopje occupied as a fort,
and the intervening plains patrolled by cavalry.

As French extended to the east and north the Boers extended also to
prevent him from outflanking them, and so the little armies stretched
and stretched until they were two long mobile skirmishing lines. The
actions therefore resolve themselves into the encounters of small
bodies and the snapping up of exposed patrols--a game in which the Boer
aptitude for guerrilla tactics gave them some advantage, though our
own cavalry quickly adapted themselves to the new conditions. On this
occasion a patrol of sixteen men from the South Australian Horse and New
South Wales Lancers fell into an ambush, and eleven were captured. Of
the remainder, three made their way back to camp, while one was killed
and one was wounded.

The duel between French on the one side and Schoeman and Lambert on the
other was from this onwards one of maneuvering rather than of fighting.
The dangerously extended line of the British at this period, over thirty
miles long, was reinforced, as has been mentioned, by the 1st Yorkshire
and later by the 2nd Wiltshire and a section of the 37th Howitzer
Battery. There was probably no very great difference in numbers between
the two little armies, but the Boers now, as always, were working
upon internal lines. The monotony of the operations was broken by the
remarkable feat of the Essex Regiment, which succeeded by hawsers and
good-will in getting two 15-pounder guns of the 4th Field Battery on to
the top of Coleskop, a hill which rises several hundred feet from the
plain and is