At Twelve O'clock
Our Scouts Heard The Sounds Of The Chanting Of Hymns In The Boer
Camps.
At two in the morning crowds of barefooted men were
clustering round the base of the ridge, and threading their way,
rifle in hand, among the mimosa-bushes and scattered boulders which
cover the slope of the hill.
Some working parties were moving guns
into position, and the noise of their labour helped to drown the
sound of the Boer advance. Both at Caesar's Camp, the east end of
the ridge, and at Waggon Hill, the west end (the points being, I
repeat, three miles apart), the attack came as a complete surprise.
The outposts were shot or driven in, and the stormers were on the
ridge almost as soon as their presence was detected. The line of
rocks blazed with the flash of their guns.
Caesar's Camp was garrisoned by one sturdy regiment, the
Manchesters, aided by a Colt automatic gun. The defence had been
arranged in the form of small sangars, each held by from ten to
twenty men. Some few of these were rushed in the darkness, but the
Lancashire men pulled themselves together and held on strenuously
to those which remained. The crash of musketry woke the sleeping
town, and the streets resounded with the shouting of the officers
and the rattling of arms as the men mustered in the darkness and
hurried to the points of danger.
Three companies of the Gordons had been left near Caesar's Camp,
and these, under Captain Carnegie, threw themselves into the
struggle. Four other companies of Gordons came up in support from
the town, losing upon the way their splendid colonel,
Dick-Cunyngham, who was killed by a chance shot at three thousand
yards, on this his first appearance since he had recovered from his
wounds at Elandslaagte. Later four companies of the Rifle Brigade
were thrown into the firing line, and a total of two and a half
infantry battalions held that end of the position. It was not a man
too much. With the dawn of day it could be seen that the Boers held
the southern and we the northern slopes, while the narrow plateau
between formed a bloody debatable ground. Along a front of a
quarter of a mile fierce eyes glared and rifle barrels flashed from
behind every rock, and the long fight swayed a little back or a
little forward with each upward heave of the stormers or rally of
the soldiers. For hours the combatants were so near that a stone or
a taunt could be thrown from one to the other. Some scattered
sangars still held their own, though the Boers had passed them. One
such, manned by fourteen privates of the Manchester Regiment,
remained untaken, but had only two defenders left at the end of the
bloody day.
With the coming of the light the 53rd Field Battery, the one which
had already done so admirably at Lombard's Kop, again deserved well
of its country.
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