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Updated: May 16, 2025
The night has been passed in preparing a surprise for the big Creusot gun on Middle Hill, which, because of his propensity for throwing shells into everybody's mess, has come to be known as the "Meddler." Deep gun-pits are dug on the northern slope of Waggon Hill, where on a nek they are screened by the higher spur from view of Middle Hill.
The Boers made a blind rush, first to one nek, then to the next, only to find that Britain's sons guarded them all. Small bodies of men might escape, but the vast supplies of mealies, waggons, guns, and all the cumbrous appliances of war, without which an army is useless, were penned in. The hand of the Field-Marshal was on them.
The battle began at three in the afternoon, and continued without intermission through the whole night. The vessels, drifting together, struck on the shoal called the Nek, near Wydeness. In the heat of the action the occurrence was hardly heeded.
The Drakensberg Range on the one side and the Buffalo River on the other formed the cleaving surfaces, Majuba and Laing's Nek were the cutting edge, and the base was the Tugela River. In mechanics a wedge is an instrument which can be usefully employed only under favourable circumstances. It has many disadvantages. It is easily jammed.
Several of the Boer prisoners have since told me I don't know with what truth that they thought we should follow them in by the Relief Nek pass, and that it was their intention to work round and threaten our communications, and either cut us off or force us to fight our way out as best we could. The quickness of our advance, too, was of the utmost importance.
Long before they could reach its crest, even if a horse were able to travel there, they must be overtaken. In short, there was nothing to do except to push for the nek, and if they were fortunate enough to reach it before the Matabele, to abandon the horse there and try to conceal themselves among the ruins of the houses beyond. This, perhaps, they might do when once the sun was down.
Clery having been invalided, the IInd Division was temporarily under the command of Lyttelton, whose orders for February 17 were to move upon Cingolo Nek and Green Hill. Dundonald was instructed to work in rear of the infantry and outflank any detachment of the enemy that might appear on the Nek.
Early on Monday morning, a mounted detachment, accompanied by the armoured train and two hundred men of the Lancashire Regiment, went forth to reconnoitre. The procession was an imposing one; at least the Boers encamped at Scholtz's Nek appeared to think so; they made no attempt to interfere with it, and thus debarred the procession from interfering with them.
Soon he could scarcely walk southwards, or east or west, for ere he had gone many yards his feet turned and set his face towards the north, that was to the narrow nek between the precipices which the Kaffirs guarded night and day. One evening he went to his hut to sleep, if sleep would come to him. It came, and with it that face and voice, but the face seemed paler, and the voice more insistent.
Louis Botha lived before the war in the southeast Transvaal, not far from Laings Nek, and near neighbors of his were a family of Irish settlers bearing the honored name of Emmet. The Emmets and the Bothas were united by ties of friendship and intermarriage, and one of the Emmets served with Louis Botha during the war.
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