From The Other
Direction Come The Shells Of The Boers, Seeking Out The Hidden
Howitzers.
They pass somewhat higher, crashing into the base of the
kopje, sometimes killing, sometimes digging their own ignominious
graves.
The staff regard them with the same indifference. One of
them tears the overcoat upon which Colonel Stuart-Wortley is seated,
another destroys his diary. His men, lying at his feet among the red
rocks, observe this with wide eyes. But he does not shift his
position. His answer is, that his men cannot shift theirs.
On Friday, February 23d, the Inniskillings, Dublins, and Connaughts
were sent out to take a trench, half-way up Railway Hill. The attack
was one of those frontal attacks, which in this war, against the new
weapons, have added so much to the lists of killed and wounded and to
the prestige of the men, while it has, in an inverse ratio, hurt the
prestige of the men by whom the attack was ordered. The result of
this attack was peculiarly disastrous. It was made at night, and as
soon as it developed, the Boers retreated to the trenches on the
crest of the hill, and threw men around the sides to bring a cross-
fire to bear on the Englishmen. In the morning the Inniskillings
found they had lost four hundred men, and ten out of their fifteen
officers. The other regiments lost as heavily. The following
Tuesday, which was the anniversary of Majuba Hill, three brigades,
instead of a regiment, were told off to take this same Railway Hill,
or Pieter's, as it was later called, on the flank, and with it to
capture two others.
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