ow
column. The assault was going to succeed. We stood up on our rocks.
Bayonets began to glitter on the distant slope. The moving lines
increased their pace. The heads of the Boers bobbing up and down in
their trenches grew fewer and fewer. They knew the tide was running too
strongly. Death and flight were thinning their ranks. Then the sky-line
of Railway Hill bristled with men, who dropped on their knees forthwith
and fired in particular haste at something that was running away down
the other side. There was the sound of cheering. Railway Hill was ours.
I looked to the left.

The neck between the hills was lined with trenches. The South Lancashire
Regiment had halted, pinned to the ground by the Boer fire. Were they
going to lose the day for us when it was already won? The question was
soon answered. In an instant there appeared on the left of the Boer
trench a dozen--only a dozen--violent forms rushing forward. A small
party had worked their way to the flank, and were at close quarters with
cold steel. And then--by contrast to their former courage--the valiant
burghers fled in all directions, and others held out their rifles and
bandoliers and begged for mercy, which was sometimes generously given,
so that by the time the whole attack had charged forward into the
trenches there was a nice string of thirty-two prisoners winding down
the hill: at which token of certain victory we shouted loudly.

Inniskilling Hill alone remained, and that was almost in our hands. Its
slopes were on three sides alive with the active figures of the Light
Brigade, and the bayonets sparkled. The hill ran into a peak. Many of
the trenches were already deserted, but the stone breastwork at the
summit still contained defenders. There, painted against the evening
sky, were the slouch hats and moving rifles. Shell after shell exploded
among them: overhead, in their faces, in the trench itself, behind them,
before them, around them. Sometimes five and six shells were bursting on
the very apex at the same instant. Showers of rock and splinters fell on
all sides.

Yet they held their ground and stayed in greater peril than was ever
mortal man before. But the infantry were drawing very near. At last the
Dutchmen fled. One, a huge fellow in a brown jersey, tarried to spring
on the parapet and empty his magazine once more into the approaching
ranks, and while he did so a 50 lb. lyddite shell burst, as it seemed,
in the midst of him, and the last d