the night he was upon
them with a hissing sleet of bullets. At the first dawn the guns opened
and the shells began to burst among them. It was a horrible ordeal for
raw troops. The men were miners and agricultural labourers, who had
never seen more bloodshed than a cut finger in their lives. They had
been four months in the country, but their life had been a picnic, as
the luxury of their baggage shows. Now in an instant the picnic was
ended, and in the grey cold dawn war was upon them--grim war with the
whine of bullets, the screams of pain, the crash of shell, the horrible
rending and riving of body and limb. In desperate straits, which would
have tried the oldest soldiers, the brave miners did well. They never
from the beginning had a chance save to show how gamely they could take
punishment, but that at least they did. Bullets were coming from all
sides at once and yet no enemy was visible. They lined one side of the
embankment, and they were shot in the back. They lined the other, and
were again shot in the back. Baird-Douglas, the Colonel, vowed to shoot
the man who should raise the white flag, and he fell dead himself before
he saw the hated emblem. But it had to come. A hundred and forty of the
men were down, many of them suffering from the horrible wounds which
shell inflicts. The place was a shambles. Then the flag went up and the
Boers at last became visible. Outnumbered, outgeneralled, and without
guns, there is no shadow of stain upon the good name of the one militia
regiment which was ever seriously engaged during the war. Their position
was hopeless from the first, and they came out of it with death,
mutilation, and honour.

Two miles south of the Rhenoster kopje stands Roodeval station, in
which, on that June morning, there stood a train containing the mails
for the army, a supply of great-coats, and a truck full of enormous
shells. A number of details of various sorts, a hundred or more, had
alighted from the train, twenty of them Post-office volunteers, some
of the Pioneer Railway corps, a few Shropshires, and other waifs and
strays. To them in the early morning came the gentleman with the tinted
glasses, his hands still red with the blood of the Derbies. 'I have
fourteen hundred men and four guns. Surrender!' said the messenger.
But it is not in nature for a postman to give up his postbag without
a struggle. 'Never!' cried the valiant postmen. But shell after shell
battered the corrugated-iron buildin