pon a small boulder to look through
glasses at the enemy, who were pouring in a hail of bullets from a
distance of little more than 150 yards, a bullet struck him in the
forehead, and there he lay, apparently lifeless, with every sense dead
to the din of war about him. A few minutes later Colonel Frank Rhodes
heard that a staff-officer had been hit. He came at once to the
conclusion that it was the young friend who had been his companion daily
since they sailed from England early in September. As he went forward to
make sure, Lieutenant Lannowe, of the 4th Dragoon Guards, aide-de-camp
to Colonel Hamilton, joined him, and these two, passing unscathed across
the shot-torn slopes, found Lord Ava lying sorely wounded, but still
alive, where Boer bullets were falling thickest about the Imperial Light
Horse. They carried him to a place of less danger, and there Colonel
Rhodes bandaged the wound, while a skilful surgeon's aid was being
summoned. By that time Majors Julian, of the Royal Army Medical Corps,
and Davis, medical officer of the Imperial Light Horse, had their hands
full, having rendered aid to many wounded men under the heaviest fire,
utterly regardless of danger to themselves. The first operation, without
which recovery would have been hopeless, was, however, performed there,
while Mauser bullets whistled through the air, and Lord Ava, still
unconscious, was borne from the field.

The few bluejackets, Gordons, Imperial Light Horse, and Engineers, under
Lieutenant Digby-Jones, R.E., were still holding their ground manfully
on the extreme westerly crest of Waggon Hill. The Boers were within
point-blank range of them on two sides, while beyond the crest and down
into Bester's Valley hundreds of others were waiting for the first sign
of panic among our men to rush the position, but held in check by a
company of the 60th Rifles and a few Light Horse occupying a small
sangar on that side. The ridge, however, was being shelled by the
enemy's guns from Middle Hill and Blaauwbank with such accuracy that
many of our men were wounded by that fire, but not a Boer was hit,
though the fighting lines were less than 100 yards apart. The 21st
Battery Field Artillery, out in comparatively open ground beyond Range
Post, swept with shrapnel the slopes and kloofs of Mounted Infantry Hill
on one side, and Major Goulburn's battery, the 42nd, searched the
reverse slope of that knoll, smiting the head of a movement by which our
foes tried