Riding along the steep bank for about two hundred yards, I found a footpath leading down one side and up the other.  No sooner had I started down this than I heard a loud explosion.  It did not sound quite so near, but on gaining the opposite bank I saw floating over the spot just quitted by me a small cloud of smoke, showing that a shell had been fired at me with marvellous accuracy.  Then a couple burst near the general’s tent, and the laager was immediately shifted behind the hill.

I reached Spion Kop, took charge of the office, and was kept so busy that for a week there was no time to have a decent wash.

The hill next ours was daily bombarded with the utmost enthusiasm, shells falling there at the rate of fully sixty a minute, while we escaped with only an occasional bomb.  Looking down upon the plain before us, we could see the British regiments drilling on the bank of the river, about two thousand yards away, probably to draw our fire, but in vain was the net spread.

The ground of operations was somewhat extensive.  For some days the enemy’s infantry had been harassing our right wing, attacking every day, and drawing a little nearer every night.  Louis Botha was almost continually present at this point, only coming into camp now and then for a few hours’ sleep.

One evening his secretary said to me, with genuine emotion, “It has all been in vain!  Our men are worn out.  They can do no more!”

He was a Hollander, and also a gentleman; that is to say, he was not one of those Hollanders who lived on the fat of the land, and then turned against us in our adversity; rather was he of the rarer stamp of Coster, who glorified his mother country by nobly dying for that of his adoption.

“Cheer up!” I replied.  “There are other hills.”

“To-morrow will tell,” he said, as he bade me good-night.

And the morrow did.  In the grey dawn two hatless and bootless young men came stumbling down into the laager.

“The British have taken the hill!”

Startled, we gazed at Spion Kop’s top—­only five hundred yards away, but invisible, covered by the thick mist as with a veil.  The enemy were there, we knew it; they could not see us as yet, but the mist would soon clear away, and then....

Our guns were rapidly trained on the spot, our men placed in position, and we waited.

I ran into the tent to telegraph the news to Colenso.  No reply to my hasty call.  The wire is cut!

“Go at once,” said the chief, “and repair the line.”

As I rode off the mist cleared, and a few minutes later the fight had begun.  The cable ran about a thousand yards behind our firing line, and as I went along, my eyes fixed on the wire, the noise of the battle sounded in my ears like the roar of a prairie fire.  Jagged pieces of shell came whizzing past, shrieking like vampires in their hunt for human flesh.

Searching carefully for the fault, my progress was slow, and it was afternoon when the Johannesburg laager was reached.  Here I found a despatch-rider, who said that reinforcements had arrived at Spion Kop early in the morning, that our men had immediately climbed the hill, and that, the issue being very, uncertain, we might have to retreat during the night.