s the
nervous subaltern.

"Fire, number one gun! Fire, number two gun!" Then two shattering
explosions, the suspense of six seconds, the burst of shrapnel in the
air, the cloud of brown dust rising where it struck, and the hollow
"boom" coming back when all was over.

These exercises were repeated with much zeal by the subaltern and his
crew, until after about fifty rounds had been fired the order came to
cease fire; and it was afterwards ascertained that, as the net result of
this commotion, one partridge had been shot. But I know of another
result. A certain subaltern member of the Royal Regiment of Artillery
sat thereafter a little straighter on his horse than he had sat a week
ago.

But while the noise was going on, for all we knew, the Boers might be
suffering heavily from the shrapnel; although we rather thought not,
since no one was shooting back at the guns. Meanwhile the infantry was
threading out to the left, from which direction a shot now and then
sounded; and the remark of the onlookers (the onlooker is invariably a
critic) was, "Why is he committing all his force to a left-flank turning
movement, leaving only a hundred and fifty men to watch his centre and
right, when there may be only a dozen men on that left kopje?"

So said we, who sat on the gun limbers looking very wise; and, by one of
those unfortunate chances which sometimes justify the amateur critic and
encourage him in his vice, we turned out to be right. What was really
happening was this. The 150 or 400 Boers (I never discovered which,
although I believe it was the smaller number) who sat on that hill and
saw us coming did not wish to stay. So they held the middle kopje, and
threw out what is called a "false flank" on to the left kopje; and then,
seeing our whole force committed to the left, they went behind the hill
and filled their pipes, and packed their saddlebags and rode off,
leaving the six men to keep us busy while they went. And then the six
men departed also; and after much careful scouting, we rode victoriously
over the kopje. If we had attacked on the right flank also, we should
probably have caught them, as Lord Chesham would in a little longer have
got round to their rear and cut them off. Of course, the whole
difficulty in such cases arises from the invisible fire of smokeless
powder. One never knows whether the banging is produced by six men
firing briskly or by sixty firing slowly, and that was why Lord Chesham
had to tire