that So-and-so is envious and spiteful; that heavy difficulties obstruct the larger schemes of life, clogging nimble aspiration with the mud of matters of fact?  Here life itself, life at its best and healthiest, awaits the caprice of the bullet.  Let us see the development of the day.  All else may stand over, perhaps for ever.  Existence is never so sweet as when it is at hazard.  The bright butterfly flutters in the sunshine, the expression of the philosophy of Omar Khayyam, without the potations.

But we awoke on the morning of the 25th in most gloomy spirits.  I had seen the evacuation of Spion Kop during the night, and I did not doubt that it would be followed by the abandonment of all efforts to turn the Boer left from the passages of the Tugela at and near Trichardt’s Drift.  Nor were these forebodings wrong.  Before the sun was fairly risen orders arrived, ’All baggage to move east of Venter’s Spruit immediately.  Troops to be ready to turn out at thirty minutes’ notice.’  General retreat, that was their meaning.  Buller was withdrawing his train as a preliminary to disengaging, if he could, the fighting brigades, and retiring across the river.  Buller!  So it was no longer Warren!  The Commander-in-Chief had arrived, in the hour of misfortune, to take all responsibility for what had befallen the army, to extricate it, if possible, from its position of peril, to encourage the soldiers, now a second time defeated without being beaten, to bear the disappointment.  Everyone knows how all this, that looked so difficult, was successfully accomplished.

The army was irritated by the feeling that it had made sacrifices for nothing.  It was puzzled and disappointed by failure which it did not admit nor understand.  The enemy were flushed with success.  The opposing lines in many places were scarcely a thousand yards apart.  As the infantry retired the enemy would have commanding ground from which to assail them at every point.  Behind flowed the Tugela, a deep, rapid, only occasionally fordable river, eighty-five yards broad, with precipitous banks.  We all prepared ourselves for a bloody and even disastrous rearguard action.  But now, I repeat, when things had come to this pass, Buller took personal command.  He arrived on the field calm, cheerful, inscrutable as ever, rode hither and thither with a weary staff and a huge notebook, gripped the whole business in his strong hands, and so shook it into shape that we crossed the river in safety, comfort, and good order, with most remarkable mechanical precision, and without the loss of a single man or a pound of stores.