a stake.
You lose and you pay forfeit, and where the game is fair the best player
is he who pays with the best grace. The attack was well prepared, well
delivered, and only miscarried on account of the excellence of the
defence. We proved once more what we had proved so often before, that
all valour and all discipline will not avail in a frontal attack against
brave coolheaded men armed with quick-firing rifles.

While the Irish Brigade assaulted Railway Hill an attack had been made
upon the left, which was probably meant as a demonstration to keep the
Boers from reinforcing their comrades rather than as an actual attempt
upon their lines. Such as it was, however, it cost the life of at least
one brave soldier, for Colonel Thorold, of the Welsh Fusiliers, was
among the fallen. Thorold, Thackeray, and Sitwell in one evening. Who
can say that British colonels have not given their men a lead?

The army was now at a deadlock. Railway Hill barred the way, and if
Hart's men could not carry it by assault it was hard to say who could.
The 24th found the two armies facing each other at this critical point,
the Irishmen still clinging to the slopes of the hill and the Boers
lining the top. Fierce rifle firing broke out between them during the
day, but each side was well covered and lay low. The troops in support
suffered somewhat, however, from a random shell fire. Mr. Winston
Churchill has left it upon record that within his own observation three
of their shrapnel shells fired at a venture on to the reverse slope of
a hill accounted for nineteen men and four horses. The enemy can never
have known how hard those three shells had hit us, and so we may also
believe that our artillery fire has often been less futile than it
appeared.

General Buller had now realised that it was no mere rearguard action
which the Boers were fighting, but that their army was standing doggedly
at bay; so he reverted to that flanking movement which, as events
showed, should never have been abandoned. Hart's Irish Brigade was at
present almost the right of the army. His new plan--a masterly one--was
to keep Hart pinning the Boers at that point, and to move his centre and
left across the river, and then back to envelope the left wing of the
enemy. By this manoeuvre Hart became the extreme left instead of the
extreme right, and the Irish Brigade would be the hinge upon which the
whole army should turn. It was a large conception, finely carried out.
The