ell our lives very dearly in a rough-and-tumble.

Alas! I was again deceived. There was to be no chance of close
quarters and cold steel, for suddenly we heard, far away out on the
veldt to the north, a sound as of some one beating a tin tray, and a
covey of little shells whistled into the ground close by the trench;
two of these burst on touching the ground. Right out of rifle-range,
away on the open veldt on the north, I saw a party of Boers, with a
white horse and a vehicle. Then I knew. But how had they managed to
hit off so well the right spot to go to to enfilade our trench before
they even knew where we were?

Pompom pompompom again, and the little steel devils ploughed their way
into the middle of us in our shell-trap, mangling seven men. I at once
diagnosed the position with great professional acumen--we were now
_enfiladed_ from _both_ flanks, but the knowledge was acquired too
late to help us, for--

"We lay bare as the paunch of the purser's sow,
To the hail of the Nordenfeldt."

This was the last straw; there was nothing left but surrender or
entire annihilation at long range. I surrendered.

Boers, as usual, sprang up from all round. We had fought for three
hours, and had twenty-five killed and seventeen wounded. Of these,
seven only had been hit by the shrapnel and rifle-fire from the
_front_. All the rest had been killed or hit from the _flanks_, where
there should be few enemies, or the _rear_, where there should be
none! This fact convinced me that my preconceived notions as to the
_front_, and its danger relative to the other points of the compass,
needed considerable modification. All my cherished ideas were being
ruthlessly swept away, and I was plunged into a sea of doubt, groping
for _something_ certain or fixed to lay hold of. Could Longfellow,
when he wrote that immortal line, "Things are not what they seem,"
ever have been in my position?

The survivors were naturally a little disheartened at their total
discomfiture, when all had started so well with them in their "crack."
This expressed itself in different ways. As one man said to a
corporal, who was plugging a hole in his ear with a bit of rag--

"Somethink sickening, I call it, this enfilading racket; you never
know which way it will take yer. I'm fairly fed up." To which the
gloomy reply, "Enfiladed? Of course we've been enfiladed. This 'ere
trench should have been wiggled about a bit, and then there would not
have bee