, the Cameronians, the 3rd
Rifles, the 1st Rifle Brigade, the Durhams, and the gallant Irishmen, so
sorely stricken and yet so eager, were all pressing upwards and onwards.
The Boer fire lulls, it ceases--they are running! Wild hat-waving men
upon the Hlangwane uplands see the silhouette of the active figures of
the stormers along the sky-line and know that the position is theirs.
Exultant soldiers dance and cheer upon the ridge. The sun is setting in
glory over the great Drakensberg mountains, and so also that night
set for ever the hopes of the Boer invaders of Natal. Out of doubt and
chaos, blood and labour, had come at last the judgment that the lower
should not swallow the higher, that the world is for the man of the
twentieth and not of the seventeenth century. After a fortnight of
fighting the weary troops threw themselves down that night with the
assurance that at last the door was ajar and the light breaking through.
One more effort and it would be open before them.

Behind the line of hills which had been taken there extended a great
plain as far as Bulwana--that evil neighbour who had wrought such harm
upon Ladysmith. More than half of the Pieters position had fallen into
Buller's hands on the 27th, and the remainder had become untenable.
The Boers had lost some five hundred in killed, wounded, and prisoners.
[Footnote: Accurate figures will probably never be obtained, but a
well-known Boer in Pretoria informed me that Pieters was the most
expensive fight to them of the whole war. ] It seemed to the British
General and his men that one more action would bring them safely into
Ladysmith.

But here they miscalculated, and so often have we miscalculated on the
optimistic side in this campaign that it is pleasing to find for
once that our hopes were less than the reality. The Boers had been
beaten--fairly beaten and disheartened. It will always be a subject for
conjecture whether they were so entirely on the strength of the Natal
campaign, or whether the news of the Cronje disaster from the western
side had warned them that they must draw in upon the east. For my own
part I believe that the honour lies with the gallant men of Natal,
and that, moving on these lines, they would, Cronje or no Cronje, have
forced their way in triumph to Ladysmith.

And now the long-drawn story draws to a swift close. Cautiously feeling
their way with a fringe of horse, the British pushed over the great
plain, delayed here and ther