inned meats and pickles. The common words "Natal Field
Force" on the boxes cut like a knife. In the middle of the tent, on a
table of cases, so low that to reach it you must sit on the ground, were
the japanned tin plates and mugs for five men's breakfast--five out of
five-and-twenty. Tied up in a waterproof sheet were the officers'
letters--the letters of their wives and mothers that had arrived that
morning seven thousand miles from home. The men they wrote to were on
their way to the prisoners' camp on Pretoria racecourse.

A miserable tale is best told badly. On the night of Sunday, October 29,
No. 10 Mountain Battery, four and a half companies of the
Gloucestershire Regiment, and six of the Royal Irish Fusiliers--some
1000 men in all--were sent out to seize a nek some seven miles
north-west of Ladysmith. At daybreak they were to operate on the enemy's
right flank--the parallel with Majuba is grimly obvious--in conjunction
with an attack from Ladysmith on his centre and right. They started. At
half-past ten they passed through a kind of defile, the Boers a
thousand feet above them following every movement by ear, if not by eye.
By some means--either by rocks rolled down on them or other hostile
agency, or by sheer bad luck--the small-arm ammunition mules were
stampeded. They dashed back on to the battery mules; there was alarm,
confusion, shots flying--and the battery mules stampeded also.

On that the officer in command appears to have resolved to occupy the
nearest hill. He did so, and the men spent the hours before dawn in
protecting themselves by _schanzes_ or breastworks of stones. At dawn,
about half-past four, they were attacked, at first lightly. There were
two companies of the Gloucesters in an advanced position; the rest, in
close order, occupied a high point on the kopje; to line the whole
summit, they say, would have needed 10,000 men. Behind the schanzes the
men, shooting sparely because of the loss of the reserve ammunition, at
first held their own with little loss.

But then, as our ill-luck or Boer good management would have it, there
appeared over a hill a new Boer commando, which a cool eye-witness put
at over 2000 strong. They divided and came into action, half in front,
half from the kopjes in rear, shooting at 1000 yards into the open rear
of the schanzes. Men began to fall. The two advanced companies were
ordered to fall back; up to now they had lost hardly a man, but once in
the open they su