have crossed open ground or climbed with silent caution up
the boulder-roughened steeps.

An explanation may perhaps be found in the fact that a Boer takes off
his boots or vel-schoon when there is noiseless stalking to be done.
Going over the battlefield afterwards I noticed that where dead Boers
were lying thickest about the salient angle of that eastern space, all
were bare-footed. Boots and even rubber-soled canvas shoes had been
taken off for the climb, and these lay in pairs beside the bodies, just
as they had been placed when the fight began. And the spots on which
these Boers lay seemed to indicate that they must have scaled the steep
just where a sentry among the rocks on top would have found most
difficulty in seeing anything as he peered over jutting edges into the
darkness below. At any rate the Manchester picket was surprised before
dawn, as I shall describe presently, though it should have been put on
the alert by rifle firing an hour earlier away on Waggon Hill, where
the fight began between two and three o'clock. Then, however, it seemed
little more than the sniping between outposts, to which custom has made
all of us somewhat inattentive, and nobody thought for a moment that a
picket of Imperial Light Horse had been practically cut off before the
Boers fired a shot or our own men had given an alarm.

Waggon Hill was at that moment the key of a very critical situation, and
had the Light Horse been seized by panic, or given way an inch, the
Boers might possibly have brought enormous numbers up to that commanding
crest and enfiladed the rear of Caesar's Camp. We know now that thousands
of Free Staters were waiting in the kloofs between Mounted Infantry Hill
and Middle Hill, not two miles distant, for the opportunity which, they
had no doubt, would be opened up to them by the success of five or six
hundred tough veterans who had volunteered to win that position or die
in the attempt. They had, however, to reckon with men whose gallantry
was proved at Elandslaagte and the night attack on Gun Hill--men who are
endowed with the rare quality which Napoleon the Great called "two
o'clock in the morning courage." One has to praise the Imperial Light
Horse so often, that reiteration may sound like flattery. But they
deserve every distinction that can be given to them for having by superb
steadiness, against great odds, saved the force on Bester's Ridge from a
very serious calamity, if not from actual disaster. They