ad brought up overnight for mounting in that position, but
it still remained on a bullock waggon. Next to them were several
companies of the King's Royal Rifles under Colonel Gore-Browne, while
the Manchester Regiment held Caesar's Camp with pickets pushed forward to
the southern crest and eastern shoulder. Nearly the whole length of
ridge hence to Waggon Hill is a rough plateau, strong but presenting
little cover from artillery fire or the rifles of any foe bold enough to
scale the heights under cover of darkness. It was scarcely entrenched at
all, having only a few sangars dotted about as rallying-points. The
Boer movements were marked by a searchlight from Bulwaan, which played
for hours in a curious way across Intombi Hospital Camp to the posts
occupied by our men, intensifying the obscurity of all-surrounding
blackness.

All we know absolutely is that long before dawn Free Staters were in
possession of the western end of Bester's Ridge, where Waggon Hill dips
steeply down from the curiously tree-fringed shoulder in bold bluffs to
a lower neck, and thence on one side to the valley in which Bester's
Farm lies amid trees, and on the other to broad veldt that is dominated
by Blaauwbank (or Rifleman's Ridge), and enfiladed by Telegraph
Hill--both Boer positions having guns of long range mounted on them; and
at the same time Transvaalers, mostly Heidelberg men, had gained a
footing on the eastern end of the same ridge where boulders in Titanic
masses, matted together by roots of mimosa trees, rise cliff-like from
the plain where Klip River, emerging from thorny thickets, bends
northward to loop miles of fertile meadow-land before flowing back into
the narrow gorge past Intombi Spruit Camp. How the Boers got there one
can only imagine, for neither the Imperial Light Horse pickets on Waggon
Hill, nor the Manchesters holding the very verge of that cliff which we
call Caesar's Camp and the Kaffirs Intombi, nor the mixed force of
volunteers and police watching the scrub lower down, saw any form or
heard a movement during the night. It was intensely dark for two or
three hours, but in that still air a steenbok's light leap from rock to
rock would have struck sharply on listening ears. Those on picket duty
aver that not a Boer could have shown himself or passed through the
mimosa scrub without being challenged. Yet four or five hundred of them
got to the jutting crest, of Caesar's Camp somehow, and to reach it they
must either