from the heights above them fell thick as the
spume of the surf on an Australian rock-ribbed coast. But the Guards had
proved to the Boers that, man to man, the Briton was his master.

In vain all that day Methuen tried by every rule he knew to draw the enemy;
vainly, the Lancers rode recklessly to induce those human rock limpets to
come out and cut them off. Cronje knew the mettle of our men, and an ironic
laugh played round his iron mouth, and still he stayed within his native
fastness; but Death sat ever at his elbow, for our gunners dropped the
lyddite shells and the howling shrapnel all along his lines, until the
trenches ran blood, and many of his guns were silenced. In the valley
behind his outer line of hills his dead lay piled in hundreds, and the
slope of the hill was a charnel-house where the wounded all writhed amidst
the masses of the dead; a ghastly tribute to British gunnery. For hours I
stood within speaking distance of the great naval gun as it spoke to the
enemy, and such a sight as their shooting the world has possibly never
witnessed. Not a shell was wasted; cool as if on the decks of a pleasure
yacht our tars moved through the fight, obeying orders with smiling
alacrity. Whenever the signal came from the balloon above us that the enemy
were moving behind their lines, the sailors sent a message from England
into their midst, and the name of the messenger was Destruction; and when,
at 1.30 p.m. of Tuesday, we drew off to Modder River to recuperate we left
a ghastly pile of dead and wounded of grim old Cronje's men as a token that
the lion of England had bared his teeth in earnest.

Three hundred yards to the rear of the little township of Modder River,
just as the sun was sinking in a blaze of African splendour on the evening
of Tuesday, the 13th of December, a long, shallow grave lay exposed in the
breast of the veldt. To the westward, the broad river, fringed with trees,
ran murmuringly, to the eastward, the heights still held by the enemy
scowled menacingly, north and south, the veldt undulated peacefully; a few
paces to the northward of that grave fifty dead Highlanders lay, dressed as
they had fallen on the field of battle; they had followed their chief to
the field, and they were to follow him to the grave. How grim and stern
those dead men looked as they lay face upward to the sky, with great hands
clenched in the last death agony, and brows still knitted with the stern
lust of the strife in whi