1, 1899

1. During the night it was considered expedient that the Highland
Brigade, 4,000 strong, under General Wauchope, should get close enough
to the lines of the foe to make it possible to charge the heights. At
midnight the gallant but ill-fated men moved cautiously through the
darkness toward the kopje where the Boers were most strongly
intrenched. They were led by a guide who was supposed to know every
inch of the country, out into the darkness of an African night.

2. So onward until three of the clock on the Monday. Then out of the
darkness a rifle rang sharp and clear, a herald of disaster--a soldier
had tripped in the dark over the hidden wires laid down by the enemy.
In a second, in the twinkling of an eye, the searchlights of the Boers
fell broad and clear as the noonday sun on the ranks of the doomed
Highlanders, though it left the enemy concealed in the shadows of the
frowning mass of hills behind them. For one brief moment the Scots
seemed paralysed by the suddenness of their discovery, for they knew
that they were huddled together like sheep within fifty yards of the
trenches of the foes.

3. Then clear above the confusion rolled the voice of the General:
"Steady, men, steady!"--and like an echo to the veterans out came the
crash of nearly a thousand rifles not fifty paces from them. The
Highlanders reeled before the shock like trees before the tempest;
their best, their bravest, fell in that wild hail of lead. General
Wauchope was down, riddled with bullets; yet gasping, dying, bleeding
from every vein, the Highland chief raised himself on his hands and
knees and cheered his men forward. Men and officers fell in heaps
together.

4. The Black Watch charged, and the Gordons and the Seaforths, with a
yell that stirred the British camp below, rushed onward to death or
disaster. The accursed wires caught them around the legs until they
floundered like trapped wolves, and all the time the rifles of the foe
sang the song of death in their ears. They fell back broken and
beaten, leaving nearly 1,300 dead and wounded, just where the broad
breast of the grassy veldt melts into the embrace of the rugged
African hills; and an hour later, the dawning came of the dreariest
day that Scotland has known for a generation past.

5. Of her officers, the flower of her chivalry, the pride of her
breeding, but few remained to tell the tale--a sad tale truly, but one
untinted with dishonour nor smirched with disgrace,