The Boers followed, and accompanied their shells by a vigorous rifle attack on the hill, and about half-past eight the position became most critical.  The troops were driven almost entirely off the main plateau and the Boers succeeded in reoccupying some of their trenches.  A frightful disaster was narrowly averted.  About twenty men in one of the captured trenches abandoned their resistance, threw up their hands, and called out that they would surrender.  Colonel Thorneycroft, whose great stature made him everywhere conspicuous, and who was from dawn till dusk in the first firing line, rushed to the spot.  The Boers advancing to take the prisoners—­as at Nicholson’s Nek—­were scarcely thirty yards away.  Thorneycroft shouted to the Boer leader:  ’You may go to hell.  I command on this hill and allow no surrender.  Go on with your firing.’  Which latter they did with terrible effect, killing many.  The survivors, with the rest of the firing line, fled two hundred yards, were rallied by their indomitable commander, and, being reinforced by two brave companies of the Middlesex Regiment, charged back, recovering all lost ground, and the position was maintained until nightfall.  No words in these days of extravagant expression can do justice to the glorious endurance which the English regiments—­for they were all English—­displayed throughout the long dragging hours of hell fire.  Between three and four o’clock the shells were falling on the hill from both sides, as I counted, at the rate of seven a minute, and the strange discharges of the Maxim shell guns—­the ‘pom-poms’ as these terrible engines are called for want of a correct name—­lacerated the hillsides with dotted chains of smoke and dust.  A thick and continual stream of wounded flowed rearwards.  A village of ambulance waggons grew up at the foot of the mountain.  The dead and injured, smashed and broken by the shells, littered the summit till it was a bloody, reeking shambles.  Thirst tormented the soldiers, for though water was at hand the fight was too close and furious to give even a moment’s breathing space.  But nothing could weaken the stubborn vigour of the defence.  The Dorset Regiment—­the last of Talbot Coke’s Brigade—­was ordered to support the struggling troops.  The gallant Lyttelton of his own accord sent the Scottish Rifles and the 3rd King’s Royal Rifles from Potgieter’s to aid them.  But though their splendid attack did not help the main action; though the British artillery, unable to find or reach the enemy’s guns, could only tear up the ground in impotent fury; though the shell fire and rifle fire never ceased for an instant—­the magnificent infantry maintained the defence, and night closed in with the British still in possession of the hill.