e with the
smoke of burning veldt. Then in the middle of the blue came a patch of
black, and spread and spread till the huge expanse was all black, pocked
with the khaki-coloured boulders and bordered with the blue of the
ever-extending fire. God help any wounded enemy who lay there!

Crushed into the face of the earth by the guns, the enemy tried to work
round our left from Tinta Inyoni. They tried first at about a
quarter-past ten, but the Natal Volunteers and some of the Imperial
Light Horse met them. We heard the rattle of their rifles; we heard the
rap-rap-rap-rap-rap of their Maxim knocking at the door, and the Boer
fire stilled again. The Boer gun had had another try at the Volunteers
before, but a round or two of shrapnel sent it to kennel again. So far
we had seemed to be losing nothing, and it was natural to suppose that
the Boers were losing a good deal. But at a quarter-past eleven the
Gloucesters pushed a little too far between the two hills, and learned
that the Boers, if their bark was silent for the moment, could still
bite. Suddenly there shot into them a cross-fire at a few hundred yards.
Down went the colonel dead; down went fifty men.

For a second a few of the rawer hands in the regiment wavered; it might
have been serious. But the rest clung doggedly to their position under
cover; the officers brought the flurried men up to the bit again. The
mountain guns turned vengeful towards the spot whence the fire came, and
in a few minutes there was another spreading, blackening patch of
veldt--and silence.

From then the action nickered on till half-past one. Time on time the
enemy tried to be at us, but the imperious guns rebuked him, and he was
still. At length the regiments withdrew. The hot guns limbered up and
left Rietfontein to burn itself out. The sweating gunners covered the
last retiring detachment, then lit their pipes. The Boers made a
half-hearted attempt to get in both on left and right; but the
Volunteers on the left, the cavalry on the right, a shell or two from
the centre, checked them as by machinery. We went back to camp
unhampered.

And at the end of it all we found that in those five hours of straggling
bursts of fighting we had lost, killed and wounded, 116 men. And what
was the good? asked doubting Thomas. Much. To begin with, the Boers must
have lost heavily; they confessed that aloud by the fact that, for all
their pluck in standing up to the guns, they made no attempt to follo