The fiery Dick-Cunyngham,
stalwart Miller-Wallnutt, the brave boy sappers Digby-Jones and
Dennis, Adams and Packman of the Light Horse, the chivalrous
Lafone - we had to mourn quality as well as numbers. The grim test
of the casualty returns shows that it was to the Imperial Light
Horse (ten officers down, and the regiment commanded by a junior
captain), the Manchesters, the Gordons, the Devons, and the 2nd
Rifle Brigade that the honours of the day are due.
In the course of the day two attacks had been made upon other
points of the British position, the one on Observation Hill on the
north, the other on the Helpmakaar position on the east. Of these
the latter was never pushed home and was an obvious feint, but in
the case of the other it was not until Schutte, their commander,
and forty or fifty men had been killed and wounded, that the
stormers abandoned their attempt. At every point the assailants
found the same scattered but impenetrable fringe of riflemen, and
the same energetic batteries waiting for them.
Throughout the Empire the course of this great struggle was watched
with the keenest solicitude and with all that painful emotion which
springs from impotent sympathy. By heliogram to Buller, and so to
the farthest ends of that great body whose nerves are the
telegraphic wires, there came the announcement of the attack.
