Placing a

brought him up from Ladysmith. dot in the concavities of the letter to represent strong Boer positions, the reader will get an exact idea of his progress, and will, moreover, have compiled for himself a compendium or memoria technica of perfect modern tactics. It was unquestionably a fine performance, and only ended in a battle because no imaginable manœuvring can sidle an army around an endless cliff with a hostile force upon its summit. As it was, the resulting battle, as will be seen, was, by admirable management, as small as possible.

The early buffets of the war have, I think, produced a curiously paradoxical danger for an absolutely fearless nation and army-namely, that of being over-cautious to cast the die in a pitched battle. It is a fault on the right side, but may be easily exaggerated into weakness. There must be battles in war, and bloody ones in such a war as this. But the battle to be described, which commenced with the seizure of Van Wyk's Hill, on the southern side of Botha's Pass, on June 6, was nothing but a triumph for its stout-hearted old director, and ended his heavy task, as every single soldier under him would for his sake have given his all to have seen it begun, with glory.

IX.

ALMOND'S NEK.

A SMALL battle that did a big thing. We have learnt enough of the Boers during the last ten months to be able to plume ourselves on having done a good day's work when we turn 5000 of them out of a position literally terraced with trenches, nodulous with gun-pits, flanked by two mountains, the whole commanding a natural glacis about ten miles long! Without undue complacency a feat of this sort may fairly be termed a "big thing," and that is what the cheerful little hurly-burly at Almond's Nek did for her Majesty's and Natal's sake.

That appalling trinity of natural barriers— Majuba, Laing's Nek, and Pougwana-which had frowned for so many days on General Buller's little force, encamped on the far side of the Ingogo river, frowned in vain on that Monday afternoon, June 11. Just at their most

"frowny " time-sundown-when the big clouds love to pile themselves angrily up behind anything grim and angry - looking on the earth beneath, and all the still South African air seems to be waiting for something awesome to happen, at that precise period about 6000 of those ugly little khaki figures, which had insulted their grandeur for so long, were gazing complacently at their innocuous backs twelve miles away to the westward. In other words, they were "turned," and as harmless as Primrose Hill.

There must always be a touch of the ludicrous in a successful turning movement to any mind whose sense of humour has not wholly succumbed to the melancholy of the veldt. Picture the weeks and weeks of digging the now disappointed Boers must have enjoyed before they could render a position so vast what it is— impregnable, a very Gibraltar looking out over a grassy sea; digging, too, in earth of heartbreaking and tool-breaking adamant, even requiring heavy blast-charges in places, before the semblance of cover is obtained! Think of the planning, the anxious disposition of trenches for the commandos to hand, the no less anxious distribution of commandos for the trenches, the cogitations as to lines of attack, and the careful

placing of the gun-pits and epaulements to meet or enfilade them! If the reader has ever been burdened with the preparation of a position in any country other than basaltic South Africa, let him double-if he be a civilian, or an unsalted soldier, let him quadruple-in his mind the sum of the difficulties he can imagine appertaining to such a task. Neither soldier nor civilian will be exaggerating the industry and herculean toil of the Boers if he apply the results of his calculation to the work done on Laing's Nek. The writer has been over every entrenched position in Natal, including, probably, at least three of the strongest in the history of defensive warfare, but he can safely say that the only one he was mercifully not required to negotiate "on business "this very one of Laing's Nek-was infinitely the most impossible of them all. But there was a 66 way round," as the American attaché remarked to General Buller after Colenso, and General Buller saw it, and took it, to appear again on the other side, wherein-to my mind at least there is no small amount of humour, which one can enjoy as froth, when the consummate generalship beneath it has been properly imbibed. One is tickled at little in South Africa. I have seen a knot of men laugh at the ineffectual explosion of a 40-lb. shell in their midst, so that

perhaps my amusement is untimely. However, to our tale, and how it befell that her Britannic Majesty's troops in Natal were set at a mole-hill instead of the mountain they expected, though even then they would have charged manfully at the dreadful leap, so great is the trust in the strong pair of hands on the reins.

June 8 saw the seizure of Botha's Pass, one of the "might have beens" of the campaign, when the scanty Dutch garrison on the tremendous battlements and buttresses of the Drakensberg fled before a frontal attack which looked like folly to a casual observer, though it was, in truth, the outcome of careful reconnaissance. What a shambles the deep valley between Inkweloane and Spitz Kop would have been had Botha only manned his outwork in time! Inkweloane is like a huge hand to the body of the main position on the nek, and, even if no turning movement had been intended, its loss was a serious menace to the Boer stronghold. Once in our possession, Laing's Nek might have fallen to a frontal attack. Denied to our artillery, it never could have. First trick to the British, albeit with a difficult hand with which to play up to it. June 9, nothing particular on the surface, though there was a mighty pulling and hauling of baggage over the steep summit of the

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