ander, surrounded by dead,
found it necessary to go back to fetch up more men. Near him, in the
sangar of "C." company, lay Captain S. Willcock of "H." company, and
Knox, before starting back, waved his arms to attract his attention,
shouting to him that the Boers were coming up from behind, that he,
Knox, had to go back, and that Willcock must look to his left. But
Knox, with a gesture of his arms, had unwittingly imitated the
military signal to retire, and the musketry, which was now one
sustained roar upon the mountain, drowned all of his shouting, except
the words "from behind." Willcock, therefore, imagining that he was
receiving an order to retire, which might have been sent forward from
the commanding officer, passed it on to Captain Fyffe, who, in turn,
communicated it to Captain Duncan, the senior officer in the sangar.
In the short retirement which followed nearly forty-five percent fell.

[Sidenote: Duncan occupies a kraal, and then surrenders.]

Following their retreating companies, Captains Duncan and Fyffe (the
latter wounded) halted by a small ruined kraal some fifty yards back,
leaped into it with six or eight men, and determined to make a stand.
Behind the kraal, the ground sloping upwards, hid the rest of the
British lines entirely from a man lying prone in the sorry shelter. So
close now were the Boers that the uproar of their rapid and incessant
shots overwhelmed all else. To the occupants of the kraal it seemed as
though silence had fallen over the British part of the position, and
this, though "D." company was shooting steadily, unshaken in the
sangar not fifty yards to their right rear. They thought that Colonel
Carleton had taken his column from the hill, and that they were alone.
For a few moments they lay, the helpless focus of hundreds of rifles,
and then, after a brief conversation with his wounded junior, Duncan
decided to surrender. Two handkerchiefs tied to the muzzle of an
uplifted rifle were apparently invisible to the Boers, whose fire
continued unabated. But the white rags, fluttering just clear of the
brow of the rise, were marked in an instant from the sangar of "D."
company, of whose proximity Duncan and his party were absolutely
unaware, and Captain R. Conner, who lay there with the commanding
officer of the Gloucester, rushed out towards them over some fifty
yards of bullet-swept ground shouting an enquiry. Meanwhile, as the
storm of lead still beat upon the shelter, Duncan, taki