ings they
were said to have said--that they would be in Ladysmith on November 9,
and I believe they half believed themselves. At any rate I make no
doubt that all this morning they were feeling--feeling our thin lines
all round for a weak spot to break in by.

They did not find it, and they gave over; but they would have come had
they thought they could come safely. They began before it was fully
light with the Manchesters. The Manchesters on Caesar's Camp were, in a
way, isolated: they were connected by telephone with headquarters, but
it took half an hour to ride up to their eyrie. They were shelled
religiously for a part of every day by Puffing Billy from Bulwan and
Fiddling Jimmy from Middle Hill.

Every officer who showed got a round of shrapnel at him. Their riflemen
would follow an officer about all day with shots at 2200 yards; the day
before they had hit Major Grant, of the Intelligence, as he was
sketching the country. Tommy, on the other hand, could swagger along the
sky-line unmolested. No doubt the Boers thought that exposed Caesar's
Camp lay within their hands.

But they were very wrong. Snug behind their _schanzes_, the Manchesters
cared as much for shells as for butterflies. Most of them were posted on
the inner edge of the flat top with a quarter of a mile of naked veldt
to fire across. They had been reinforced the day before by a field
battery and a squadron and a half of the Light Horse. And they had one
_schanze_ on the outer edge of the hill as an advanced post.

In the dim of dawn, the officer in charge of this post saw the Boers
creeping down behind a stone wall to the left, gathering in the bottom,
advancing in, for them, close order. He welted them with rifle-fire:
they scattered and scurried back.

The guns got to work, silenced the field-guns on Flat Top Hill, and
added scatter and scurry to the assailing riflemen. Certainly some
number were killed; half-a-dozen bodies, they said, lay in the open all
day; lanterns moved to and fro among the rocks and bushes all night; a
new field hospital and graveyard were opened next day at Bester's
Station. On the other horn of our position the Devons had a brisk
morning. They had in most places at least a mile of clear ground in
front of them. But beyond that, and approaching within a few hundred
yards of the extreme horn of the position, is scrub, which ought to have
been cut down.

Out of this scrub the enemy began to snipe. We had there, tucked i