others Rietfontein; the last is perhaps the least
outlandish.

The force moved steadily on towards Modderspruit, one battalion in front
of the guns. "Tell Hamilton to watch his left flank," said one in
authority. "The enemy are on both those hills." Sure enough, there on
the crest, there dotted on the sides, were the moving black mannikins
that we have already come to know afar as Boers. Presently the dotted
head and open files of a battalion emerged from behind the guns,
changing direction half-left to cover their flank. The batteries pushed
on with the one battalion ahead of them. It was half-past eight, and
brilliant sunshine; the air was dead still; through the clefts of the
nearer hills the blue peaks of the Drakensberg looked as if you could
shout across to them.

Boom! The sound we knew well enough; the place it came from was the left
shoulder of Matawana's Hoek; the place it would arrive at we waited,
half anxious, half idly curious, to see. Whirr--whizz--e-e-e-e--phutt!
Heavens, on to the very top of a gun! For a second the gun was a whirl
of blue-white smoke, with grey-black figures struggling and plunging
inside it. Then the figures grew blacker and the smoke cleared--and in
the name of wonder the gun was still there. Only a subaltern had his
horse's blood on his boot, and his haversack ripped to rags.

But there was no time to look on that or anything else but the amazing
nimbleness of the guns. At the shell--even before it--they flew apart
like ants from a watering-can. From, crawling reptiles they leaped into
scurrying insects--the legs of the eight horses pattering as if they
belonged all to one creature, the deadly sting in the tail leaping and
twitching with every movement. One battery had wheeled about, and was
drawn back at wide intervals facing the Boer hill. Another was pattering
swiftly under cover of a ridge leftward; the leading gun had crossed the
railway; the last had followed; the battery had utterly disappeared.
Boom! Whirr--whizz--e-e-e-e--phutt! The second Boer shell fell stupidly,
and burst in the empty veldt. Then bang!--from across the
railway--e-e-e-e--whizz--whirr--silence--and then the little white
balloon just over the place the Boer shell came from. It was twenty-five
minutes to nine.

In a double chorus of bangs and booms the infantry began to deploy.
Gloucesters and Devons wheeled half left off the road, split into
firing line and supports in open order, trampled through the w