ill-fated, general moved cautiously
through the darkness towards the kopje where the Boers were most strongly
entrenched. They were led by a guide, who was supposed to know every inch
of the country, out into the darkness of an African night. The brigade
marched in line of quarter-column, each man stepping cautiously and slowly,
for they knew that any sound meant death. Every order was given in a hoarse
whisper, and in whispers it was passed along the ranks from man to man;
nothing was heard as they moved towards the gloomy, steel-fronted heights
but the brushing of their feet in the veldt grass and the deep-drawn
breaths of the marching men.

So, onward, until three of the clock on the morning of 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 foe. 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 chieftain
raised himself on his hands and knees, and cheered his men forward. Men and
officers fell in heaps together.

The Black Watch charged, and the Gordons and the Seaforths, with a yell
that stirred the British camp below, rushed onward--onward to death or
disaster. The accursed wires caught them round 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. Then 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-pas