scene of blood and
fury.

Thus confronted, the Irish perished rather than retire. A few men indeed
ran back down the slope to the nearest cover, and there savagely turned
to bay, but the greater part of the front line was shot down. Other
companies, some from the Connaught Rangers, some headed by the brave
Colonel Sitwell, from the Dublin Fusiliers, advanced to renew--it was
already too late to support--the attack, and as the light faded another
fierce and bloody assault was delivered and was repulsed. Yet the Irish
soldiers would not leave the hill, and, persuaded at length that they
could not advance further, they lay down on the ground they had won,
and began to build walls and shelters, from behind which they opened a
revengeful fire on the exulting Boers. In the two attacks both colonels,
three majors, twenty officers, and six hundred men had fallen out of an
engaged force of scarcely one thousand two hundred. Then darkness pulled
down the curtain, and the tragedy came to an end for the day.

All through the night of the 23rd a heavy rifle fire was maintained by
both sides. Stray bullets whistled about the bivouacs, and the South
African Light Horse, who had selected a most sheltered spot to sleep in,
had a trooper hit. There were a certain number of casualties along the
whole front. As soon as it was daylight I rode out with Captain Brooke
to learn what had happened in the night. We knew that the hill had not
been carried before dusk, but hoped, since the combatants were so close
together, that in the darkness the bayonet would have settled the
matter.

We had just reached the hollow behind the advanced kopje from which I
had watched the attack on the previous evening, when suddenly a shrapnel
shell burst in the air above our heads with a sharp, startling bang. The
hollow and slope of the hill were crowded with Infantry battalions lying
down in quarter column. The bullets and splinters of the shell smote the
ground on all sides. We were both mounted and in the centre of the cone
of dispersion. I was immediately conscious that nothing had happened to
me, though the dust around my horse was flicked up, and I concluded that
everyone had enjoyed equally good fortune. Indeed, I turned to Brooke,
and was about to elaborate my theory that shrapnel is comparatively
harmless, when I saw some stir and turmoil and no less than eight men
were picked up killed or wounded by this explosion. I have only once
before seen in w