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Updated: May 10, 2025
They camped in a dry donga, and next morning at daybreak left their horses behind them in charge of the men and walked forward. A mile farther they obtained a view of the bridge. It stood at the point where the river, after running for some little distance north-west, made a sharp curve to the south. The bridge stood at this loop.
There followed a brief delay, while a plan of maneuver was made and expounded, while the tripods were set up, the cameras screwed on, and the ropers moved out to their appointed places. Then all at once the cheetah started, and, instead of breaking away, as we had calculated he would, he doubled on his tracks and made for the shelter of the donga. It was a quick, sharp race and the cheetah won.
It was while we were trying to pick up the lost trail of the lions that we flushed a cheetah out of one of the dongas. It broke away along the foothills, and finally stopped at bay in a district where the going was so bad for the horses that we had to give up the attempt. Donga. a gully. With the rhinoceros we had scarcely any chance whatsoever.
Still hoping that the laggard reinforcements would come up, the survivors held desperately on; but both in the kraal and in the donga their numbers were from minute to minute diminishing. There was no formal surrender and no white flag, for, when fifty per cent of the British were down, the Boers closed in swiftly and rushed the position.
The Boer loss is estimated at fifty, but it is impossible to know. About 3 p.m. about eighty Boers came down the deep ravine or donga at the further end of the ridge. A mounted infantry picket of three men was away across the donga, watching the road towards Lombard's Nek. Instead of retiring, they calmly lay down and fired into the thick of the Boers whenever they saw them.
Somehow I thought that Raffles was going to smile, but the grim set of his mouth never altered, neither was there any change in the ashy pallor which had come over him in the donga when Connal mouthed his name. It was only his eyes that lighted up at the last question. "I am fighting, sir," said he, as simply as any subaltern in the army.
The other side, at the back of which was the donga we were 'fanning, was raked by the heavy artillery on the Hlangwani spur and by the field batteries arranged along the south side of the river. Observe the influence of the Monte Cristo ridge! It made Barton's Hill untenable by the Boers; and Barton's Hill prepared the way for an attack on Railway Hill, and Railway Hill but I must not anticipate.
In the meanwhile the attention of Generals Buller and Clery had been called to the desperate position of the guns, and they had made their way to that further nullah in the rear where the remaining limber horses and drivers were. This was some distance behind that other donga in which Long, Bullock, and their Devons and gunners were crouching.
We rode on for a mile or two, and then saw a pretty little herd of springbok about eighteen hundred yards away on the left. Slipping down into a donga, I left the horse and crawled forward, getting within nice, easy range. I dropped one of the pretty little beauties.
With scratch teams from the limbers, driven by single gunners, the twelve-pounders staggered out of action, and the skirmish line of mounted infantry sprang to their feet amid the hail of bullets to cheer them as they passed. It was no slight task to extricate that sorely stricken force from the close contact of an exultant enemy, and to lead it across that terrible donga.
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