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Updated: May 10, 2025
Anxious to see the surrender, I followed on my pony, but on the instant there broke out a savage fire from the kopje, and with difficulty I found shelter in a donga. Here were two of the Natal Carabineers one a bearded man of the well-to-do farmer class, the other a young fair-haired gentleman both privates, both as cool as ice.
Now at the time she was riding on a path which ran along the edge of a little rock-strewn donga not more than eight or ten feet deep, but steep-sided. Into this donga the bull, which had shut its eyes to charge after the fashion of its kind, plunged headlong, and as it chanced struck its horns against a stone, twisting and dislocating the neck, so that it lay there still and dead.
The cavalry moved to the left to find some drift by which the donga could be passed, and out of chaos there came in a few minutes calm and a settled purpose. It was for Q battery to cover the retreat of the force, and most nobly it did it. A fortnight later a pile of horses, visible many hundreds of yards off across the plain, showed where the guns had stood.
Serjeant-Major Martin of U, with a single driver on a wheeler, got away the last gun of his battery. The four guns which were extricated of Q, under Major Phipps-Hornby, whirled across the plain, pulled up, unlimbered, and opened a brisk fire of shrapnel from about a thousand yards upon the donga.
Then they took a long sweep round to a point where the ground was broken, and a shallow donga ran up in a direction that would bring them within a hundred yards of the position occupied by their hidden assailants. There they were seen to dismount, and, after some talk, leaving all the horses in the charge of one man, probably one of the wounded, they entered the donga.
Part of the force had thrown themselves, under Nairne and Milne, into a donga, which gave some shelter from the sleet of bullets. The others, under Captain Butters, held on to a ruined kraal. The Boers pushed the attack very rapidly, however, and were soon able with their superior numbers to send a raking fire down the donga, which made it a perfect death-trap.
Following the course of a donga he found that the narrow valley formed an admirable means for a column to advance if protected by flankers, but after tracing it for the best part of two miles Wilmshurst discovered that it terminated abruptly, merging into a vast open plain. Cautiously the subaltern crept up the sloping face of the donga until his head was just above the edge of the level ground.
But the gods had decided otherwise, for the whiplike crack of rifles suddenly cut the air, and the bullets fell so thick around the pursuers that the three men could almost breathe lead. Half a mile away, on the far side of the donga, appeared a squad of Yeomanry, blazing away like veritable seraphs at Brabant and his men, whilst they let the flying Boer go free.
The ground between the camp and the nearest point of the donga was thickly strewn with boulders, with bushes growing between them. The lads had all shifted their position to this side. "Don't open fire till I give the order," Chris said quietly. "We have got them now." Except for a slight movement of the bushes, it would not have been known that the Boers had left the donga.
Meantime, the South African Police extreme left had swept round to the head of the spruit on both sides of which the donga was formed, the South African Mounted Riflemen and more South African Police closed in, the Defence Force unit getting in rear and in flank of the rebels to cut them off.
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