The fighting troops stood fast for two days, while the train of waggons streamed back over the bridges and parked in huge black squares on the southern bank.  Then, on the night of the 26th, the retreat began.  It was pitch dark, and a driving rain veiled all lights.  The ground was broken.  The enemy near.  It is scarcely possible to imagine a more difficult operation.  But it was performed with amazing ease.  Buller himself—­not Buller by proxy or Buller at the end of a heliograph—­Buller himself managed it.  He was the man who gave orders, the man whom the soldiers looked to.  He had already transported his train.  At dusk he passed the Royals over the ford.  By ten o’clock all his cavalry and guns were across the pontoon bridges.  At ten he began disengaging his infantry, and by daylight the army stood in order on the southern bank.  While the sappers began to take the pontoon bridges to pieces the Boers, who must have been astonished by the unusual rapidity of the movement, fired their first shell at the crossing.  We were over the river none too soon.

A successful retreat is a poor thing for a relieving army to boast of when their gallant friends are hard pressed and worn out.  But this withdrawal showed that this force possesses both a leader and machinery of organisation, and it is this, and this alone, that has preserved our confidence.  We believe that Buller gauged the capacity of one subordinate at Colenso, of another at Spion Kop, and that now he will do things himself, as he was meant to do.  I know not why he has waited so long.  Probably some pedantic principle of military etiquette:  ’Commander-in-Chief should occupy a central position; turning movements should be directed by subordinates.’  But the army believes that this is all over now, and that for the future Buller will trust no one but himself in great matters; and it is because they believe this that the soldiers are looking forward with confidence and eagerness to the third and last attempt—­for the sands at Ladysmith have run down very low—­to shatter the Boer lines.

We have waited a week in the camp behind Spearman’s Hill.  The General has addressed the troops himself.  He has promised that we shall be in Ladysmith soon.  To replace the sixteen hundred killed and wounded in the late actions, drafts of twenty-four hundred men have arrived.  A mountain battery, A Battery R.H.A., and two great fortress guns have strengthened the artillery.  Two squadrons of the 14th Hussars have been added to the cavalry, so that we are actually to-day numerically stronger by more than a thousand men than when we fought at Spion Kop, while the Boers are at least five hundred weaker—­attrition versus recuperation.  Everyone has been well fed, reinforced and inspirited, and all are prepared for a supreme effort, in which we shall either reach Ladysmith or be flung back truly beaten with a loss of six or seven thousand men.

I will not try to foreshadow the line of attack, though certain movements appear to indicate where it will be directed.  But it is generally believed that we fight to-morrow at dawn, and as I write this letter seventy guns are drawing up in line on the hills to open the preparatory bombardment.