nfire, few among them
realised that the sounds indicated anything more serious than a Boer
demonstration which would fizzle out quickly, and even when bullets
began to fall in the town itself, or went whistling away overhead, the
only comment made was that Mauser rifles must have a marvellous range if
they could send bullets so far beyond the ridge aimed at.

Bulwaan's 6-inch Creusot opened fire as the sun rose behind it in a
splendour of orange and crimson clouds. The white smoke changed to
wreaths of blue and deep purple against that glowing sky, while people
waited to hear the gurgling scream of a shell. It did not come the way
they expected, but burst above the dark crest of Caesar's Camp. Then the
watchers, relieved because the big guns had found other occupation than
battering down houses, went back to bed or to their morning baths,
little thinking that the fate of Ladysmith was at the moment dependent
on men who lay among rocks, or behind grass tussocks, looking through
rifle sights at such short range that they could almost see the colour
of each other's eyes.

Colonel Hamilton, who had ridden out with his staff, and accompanied by
Colonel F. Rhodes, to the highest knoll of Bester's Ridge, grasped the
situation quickly and ordered up reinforcements. The Boers who had crept
round the crest of the eastern steep, which I have called by its Kaffir
name Intombi, were even then almost up to the camp that Colonel Hamilton
had quitted half an hour earlier, but screened from the Manchester
battalion's fire by a swell of the ground in front. Their further
progress, however, was stayed by a counter attack from Border Mounted
Rifles and Natal Volunteers whom Colonel Royston brought up to reinforce
the Frontier Police under Major Clark, who had been holding that point
with dogged determination since dawn. The brigadier, seeing that for a
time no headway was being made by the enemy against Caesar's Camp,
turned his attention towards Waggon Hill and sent Lord Ava forward to
reconnoitre from the spot where Colonel Edwardes, with the main body of
Imperial Light Horse, reduced to less than half its original strength by
losses in former actions, was making a gallant effort to relieve the
remnants of two squadrons from their perilous plight on Waggon Hill.
Lord Ava watched its issue from the fighting line beside men with whom
he had scaled the rough heights of Elandslaagte and the stiffer steeps
of Gun Hill. As he raised himself u