At ten o'clock a band of men
slipped out of the town.
There were six hundred of them, all
irregulars, drawn from the Imperial Light Horse, the Natal
Carabineers, and the Border Mounted Rifles, under the command of
Hunter, youngest and most dashing of British Generals. Edwardes and
Boyston were the subcommanders. The men had no knowledge of where
they were going or what they had to do, but they crept silently
along under a drifting sky, with peeps of a quarter moon, over a
mimosa-shadowed plain. At last in front of them there loomed a dark
mass - it was Gun Hill, from which one of the great Creusots had
plagued them. A strong support (four hundred men) was left at the
base of the hill, and the others, one hundred Imperials, one
hundred Borders and Carabineers, ten Sappers, crept upwards with
Major Henderson as guide. A Dutch outpost challenged, but was
satisfied by a Dutch-speaking Carabineer. Higher and higher the men
crept, the silence broken only by the occasional slip of a stone or
the rustle of their own breathing. Most of them had left their
boots below. Even in the darkness they kept some formation, and the
right wing curved forward to outflank the defence. Suddenly a
Mauser crack and a spurt of flame - then another and another! 'Come
on, boys! Fix bayonets!' yelled Karri Davies. There were no
bayonets, but that was a detail. At the word the gunners were off,
and there in the darkness in front of the storming party loomed the
enormous gun, gigantic in that uncertain light.
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