uick-firing guns would be effective.

Positions for field batteries are prepared at other points round the
wide sweep, but only to be occupied as occasion may arise, and therefore
one does not care at present to locate them more precisely. The enemy,
having heavy artillery of various calibre mounted on Bulwaan, is able to
enfilade certain posts held by our infantry pickets on the heels of the
horse-shoe, but there are folds among the rocky kopjes where men can lie
comparatively screened from shells, which at that distance give timely
notice of their coming, as sound travels rather faster than the
projectiles do at the end of their flight.

We have outposts on Intombi or Maiden's Castle, which forms the
horse-shoe's southern heel, others stretching westward thence to a gap
in the toe of the shoe, through which a wood runs nearly due west until
it branches off to the Drakensberg Passes in one direction and
Maritzburg in the other, and pickets on the north-western and northern
heights, with a detached post at Observation Hill, an elongated kopje
outside the general defences, overlooking a wide valley of mimosa scrub
towards Rietfontein, which is the enemy's main stronghold, commanding
as it does the railways to Van Reenan's Pass in the west, and to
Newcastle in the north. Except for a distance of two miles from
Ladysmith, therefore, both these railways are in the hands of the Boers,
who can use them as uninterrupted lines of communication with the Orange
Free State and the Transvaal respectively. That they were being so used
to some purpose we had reason for believing, during the two peaceful
days following the one which from its associations has come to be known
among soldiers as "Mournful Monday." Standing on the naval battery, one
could watch Boers hard at work preparing positions near Lombard's Kop,
and along the crest of Bulwaan, for artillery that was probably then
being brought by railway from Laing's Nek, and at the same time columns
of Boer horsemen were moving behind Bulwaan southwards, evidently intent
upon cutting our own lines of communication. That they would be allowed
to accomplish it without a timely effort on our part to prevent them
seemed inconceivable.

For most of us it was a shock to realise that ten or twelve thousand
British soldiers could be shut up by an army of Boer farmers before any
attempt at a counter-stroke had been made. The mobility of our enemies,
however, gives them a wonderful advant