lf-past eight the position became most
critical. The troops were driven almost entirely off the main plateau
and the Boers succeeded in reoccupying some of their trenches. A
frightful disaster was narrowly averted. About twenty men in one of the
captured trenches abandoned their resistance, threw up their hands, and
called out that they would surrender. Colonel Thorneycroft, whose great
stature made him everywhere conspicuous, and who was from dawn till dusk
in the first firing line, rushed to the spot. The Boers advancing to
take the prisoners--as at Nicholson's Nek--were scarcely thirty yards
away. Thorneycroft shouted to the Boer leader: 'You may go to hell. I
command on this hill and allow no surrender. Go on with your firing.'
Which latter they did with terrible effect, killing many. The survivors,
with the rest of the firing line, fled two hundred yards, were rallied
by their indomitable commander, and, being reinforced by two brave
companies of the Middlesex Regiment, charged back, recovering all lost
ground, and the position was maintained until nightfall. No words in
these days of extravagant expression can do justice to the glorious
endurance which the English regiments--for they were all
English--displayed throughout the long dragging hours of hell fire.
Between three and four o'clock the shells were falling on the hill from
both sides, as I counted, at the rate of seven a minute, and the strange
discharges of the Maxim shell guns--the 'pom-poms' as these terrible
engines are called for want of a correct name--lacerated the hillsides
with dotted chains of smoke and dust. A thick and continual stream of
wounded flowed rearwards. A village of ambulance waggons grew up at the
foot of the mountain. The dead and injured, smashed and broken by the
shells, littered the summit till it was a bloody, reeking shambles.
Thirst tormented the soldiers, for though water was at hand the fight
was too close and furious to give even a moment's breathing space. But
nothing could weaken the stubborn vigour of the defence. The Dorset
Regiment--the last of Talbot Coke's Brigade--was ordered to support the
struggling troops. The gallant Lyttelton of his own accord sent the
Scottish Rifles and the 3rd King's Royal Rifles from Potgieter's to aid
them. But though their splendid attack did not help the main action;
though the British artillery, unable to find or reach the enemy's guns,
could only tear up the ground in impotent fury; thou