Next morning, July 24, soon after light, the main body of the Guides and Lovat’s Scouts (who are under Rimington at present) came out, and we rode down to the slopes on the left of the Boer valley again.  Here we crept up as far as we could and began to put in our fire.  It must have been very annoying for them, for a part of their position was quite exposed to us.  We could see the short white cliff at the edge of the basin and the Boers moving about and running up and down, diving into fissures and getting under cover, for all the world like rabbits, as our fire searched the position.  They replied, but though a lot of bullets were whistling about, no one was hit.  There was a Maxim at the foot of the conical hill rattling away, and the Black Watch were again on the hill itself, blazing away at the rocks as vigorously as ever.  Then at last between us and them up gallops a section of guns, and the little puff balls begin to burst along the rock edge in a way which we could see was very disconcerting for the Boers, who were rapidly finding the place too hot for them.  A little after, some one sings out, “Here comes the attack!” and true enough we can make out the little khaki dots in long loose strings moving forward round the hill towards the valley head.  It is the Seaforths.  We on our side “carry on the motion,” dash forward, lie down and shoot, and on again.  We make for a kopje on our edge of the valley.  The fire is too hot for the Boers to dare to show up much and there is not much opposition.  But I can assure you that a charge of 1500 yards, even without the enemy’s fire, is a serious thing enough.  Puffing and panting, I struggle on.  Long-legged Colonials go striding by land leave me gasping in the rear.  When at last we reach the kopje and look down into the sunken valley, the Seaforths are pouring in their fire on the retreating Boers, our fellows are doing the same from the kopje top, but I myself am too pumped out to care for anything and can only lie on the ground and gasp.

I see in your last letter you want to know about the character of the Guides, and whether there has been any cases of treachery among them.  I don’t know what started these old yarns.  They were invented about Magersfontein time, probably to account for that awful mishap, and got into the local press here and made a lot of fuss, but we have heard nothing since on that score.  There is such a lot of treachery put here (owing to the intermingling of English and Dutch in their two territories) that almost anything in that line seems credible, and there are numbers of people about, loafers in bars and fifth-rate boarding-houses, to whom anything base seems perfectly natural, and who delight in starting and circulating such tales.  At the same time there are also numbers of honest and loyal men, and it is from these, and exclusively from these, that the fighters are drawn.  In South Africa, and among the South Africans, a war of this sort, between neighbours and cousins, is the sternest