The ground sloped down in a slight hollow.  It was thickly sprinkled with snow and dotted here and there with little green spots where the grass tufts showed through.  A wire fence crossed the hollow lower down.  Luckily we heard their voices before they started shooting, and instantly we turned and rode for it, the Mausers all opening immediately and the bullets cracking and whistling round our ears.  As bad luck would have it, my pony, which, like most of them, knows and dreads the sound of rifles fired at him (though he will stand close to a battery or among men firing without minding it in the least), became so frantic at the noise of the bullets that I was quite unable to steer him.  With head wrenched round he bored away straight down the hill towards the wire.  As we got to it I managed to lift him half round and we struck it sideways.  The shock flung me forward on to his neck, which I clasped with my left arm and just saved myself falling.  For an instant or two he struggled in the wire, a mark for every rifle, and then got clear.  In his efforts he had got half through his girths and the saddle was back on his rump.  A pretty spectacle we must have looked, I sitting back on his tail, my hat in my hand, both stirrups dangling, and the bullets whistling round both of us like hailstones.  However, I lugged him out at last, and we went up the side of the fence broadside on to the shooters, as hard as ever we could lay legs to the ground.  It is a difficult thing to bring off a crossing shot at that pace, and in a few hundred yards we were over the slope and out of shot.  I have seen lots of our men have much narrower escapes than this.

Well, after all that, we will get back to the action.  Having located the enemy, the Guides all collected behind the conical hill, climbed up, and from the edges of it began shooting down into the Boer position.  Here we were joined by the Black Watch, who carried on the same game.  It was not, however, at all a paying game, and the fact that the Boers had not held this hill themselves, though so close to their position, is sufficient of itself to show their remarkable skill in choice of ground.  For the hill, conical and regular in shape, was perfectly bare, and while they behind the sharp ledges and in the fissures of the rocks below were well concealed from the men above, these as they crept round the smooth hillside came into immediate view against the sky.  The sleet of bullets shaving the hill edge was like the wind whistling past.  The Black Watch lost a lot of men here.  In the afternoon the Guides and some of Lovat’s Scouts pushed forward on the left and gained a low ridge, where, lying down, we could command a part of the enemy’s position, and send in a flanking fire.  This manoeuvre was useful and suggested a plan for next day.  That night I had to take out a picket on a hill on our south-east front and had but a sorry time of it; for it was a bitterly cold, rather wet night, and the position was not without its anxiety.  I got little sleep.