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That night they nearly overwhelmed me.... I thought of the grim silence of the surgeon's tent, the miseries and disordered ravings of the fever hospital, of the midnight burial of a journalist at Ladysmith with the distant searchlight on Bulwana flicking suddenly upon our faces and making the coffin shine silver white. What a vast trail of destruction South Africa had become!
One more effort and it would be open before them. Behind the line of hills which had been taken there extended a great plain as far as Bulwana that evil neighbour who had wrought such harm upon Ladysmith. More than half of the Pieters position had fallen into Buller's hands on the 27th, and the remainder had become untenable.
Yet so accurate was the fire, carried on under an incessant rain of shells from the big Dutch gun on Bulwana, that not one shot miscarried and that Major Abdy and his men succeeded in sweeping the further slope without loss to our own fighting line.
That gives the real picture of how Ladysmith came into her inheritance, and of how she received her rescuers. On the morning after Dundonald had ridden in and out of Ladysmith, two other correspondents and myself started to relieve it on our own account. We did not know the way to Ladysmith, and we did not then know whether or not the Boers still occupied Bulwana Mountain.
He had just got opposite the Town Hall hospital, when a shell from Bulwana burst right under his horse. When the cloud of dust and smoke cleared away, we found the horse lying on the road completely disembowelled, and the poor fellow flung on to the footpath, with a long piece of shell sticking in his side. As he was taken into the hospital he said, "This means two more Dutchmen killed."
These four hills and the ground between them Buller proposed to occupy, and then pass between Cingolo and Monte Cristo to a drift of the Tugela N.E. of Monte Cristo, cross the river and advance by the Klip Riyer on Bulwana.
Shortly before noon it was ascertained that Bulwana Hill was abandoned by the enemy, and the army was thereon ordered to camp in the plain, no further fighting being necessary. The failure to pursue the retreating Boers when two fine cavalry brigades were standing idle and eager must be noticed.
Heavy guns could be seen on other hills to the left of Grobler's Kloof; while far away behind Colenso was the crest of Mount Bulwana, from which a cannonade was being directed upon Ladysmith and an occasional white burst of smoke showed that the garrison were replying successfully. On all the lower slopes of the hills were lines, sometimes broken, sometimes connected, rising one above another.
I had a moment in which to decide whether I would rank as officer or private, and chose the former, a choice I was soon to regret. Gradually it became night. The scene as the daylight faded was striking and the circumstances were impressive. The dark shadow of Bulwana mountain flung back over the Dutch camp, and the rugged, rock-strewn hills rose about it on all sides.
The near ones were in our hands, but no attempt had been made in the early days of the war to fortify and hold Bulwana, Lombard's Kop, and the other positions from which the town might be shelled.
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