s Cave Redoubt with the 4.7; to the left two field-guns, unlimbered
and left alone, and some of the Rifle Brigade snug behind their stone
and earth schanzes. In front was the low, woody, stony crest of
Observation Hill; behind was the tall table-top of Surprise Hill--the
first ours, the second the enemy's. Under the slope of Observation Hill
were long, dark lines of horses; up to the sky-line, prolonging the
front leftward, stole half-a-dozen of the 5th Lancers. From just beyond
them came the tack, tack, tack, tap.

Tack, tap; tack, tap--it went on minute by minute, hour by hour.

The sun warmed the air to an oven; painted butterflies, azure and
crimson, came flitting over the stones; still the devil went on
hammering nails into the hills. Down leftward a black-powder gun was
popping on the film-cut ridge of Bluebank. A Boer shell came fizzing
from the right, and dived into a whirl of red dust, where nothing was.
Another--another--another, each pitched with mathematical accuracy into
the same nothing. Our gunners ran out to their guns, and flung four
rounds on to the shoulder of Surprise Hill. Billy puffed from
Bulwan--came 10,000 yards jarring and clattering loud overhead--then
flung a red earthquake just beyond the Lancers' horses. Again and
again,--it looked as if he could not miss them; but the horses only
twitched their tails, as if he were a new kind of fly. The 4.7 crashed
hoarsely back, and a black nimbus flung up far above the trees on the
mountain. And still the steady tack and tap--from the right among the
Devons and Liverpools, from the right centre, where the Leicesters were,
from the left centre, among the 60th, and the extreme left, from
Caesar's Camp.

The fight tacked on six mortal hours and then guttered out. From the
early hour they began and from the number of shells and cartridges they
burned I suppose the Boers meant to do something. But at not one point
did they gain an inch. We were playing with them--playing with them at
their own game. One of our men would fire and lie down behind a rock;
the Boers answered furiously for three minutes. When they began to die
down, another man fired, and for another three minutes the Boers
hammered the blind rocks. On six hours' fighting along a front of ten or
twelve miles we lost three killed and seventeen wounded. And, do you
know, I really believe that this tack-tapping among the rocks was the
attack after all. They had said--or it was among the million th