over the
ridge of the hills veils of smoke like lace. Hideous sounds tortured
the air--crackling, snapping, spitting sounds like the laughter of
animals with steel throats. Never was ill work better done than when,
on that radiant veld, the sky one vast turquoise vault, beneath which
quivered a shimmer of quicksilver light, the pom-poms, the maulers, and
the shrapnel of Kruger's men mowed down Stafford and his battery,
showered them, drowned them in a storm of lead.

"Alamachtig," said a Rustenburg dopper who, at the end of the day, fell
into the hands of the English, "it was like cutting alfalfa with a
sickle! Down they tumbled, horses and men, mashed like mealies in the
millstones. A damn lot of good horses was killed this time. The
lead-grinders can't pick the men and leave the horses. It was a
verdomde waste of good horses. The Rooinek eats from a bloody basin
this day."

Alamachtig!

At the moment Ian Stafford fell the battle was well launched. The air
was shrieking with the misery of mutilated men and horses and the
ghoulish laughter of pom-poms. When he went down it seemed to him that
human anger had reached its fullest expression. Officers and men alike
were in a fury of determination and vengeance. He had seen no fear, no
apprehension anywhere, only a defiant anger which acted swiftly,
coolly. An officer stepped over the lacerated, shattered body of a
comrade of his mess with the abstracted impassiveness of one who finds
his way over a puddle in the road; and here were puddles too--puddles
of blood. A gunner lifted away the corpse of his nearest friend from
the trail and strained and wrenched at his gun with the intense
concentration of one who kneads dough in a trough. The sobbing agony of
those whom Stafford had led rose up from the ground around him, and
voices cried to be put out of pain and torture. These begrimed men
around him, with jackets torn by bullets, with bandaged head stained
with blood or dragging leg which left a track of blood behind, were not
the men who last night were chatting round the camp-fires and making
bets as to where the attack would begin to-day.

Stafford was cool enough, however. It was as though an icy liquid had
been poured into his veins. He thought more clearly than he had ever
done, even in those critical moments of his past when cool thinking was
indispensable. He saw the mistake that had been made in giving his
battery work which might have been avoided, and with the