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One was found for me below the cataract by Colonel Sandbach, Royal Engineers.... On the 26th, finding that I could make a practicable approach, I crossed the guns and baggage back to the south side of the Tugela, took up the pontoon bridge on the night of the 26th, and relaid it at the new site.... On the 27th General Barton, with two battalions 6th Brigade and the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, crept about one and a half miles down the banks of the river, and, ascending an almost precipitous cliff of about 500 feet, assaulted and carried the top of Pieter's Hill.
The enemy appeared to mean business this time, and our commando had already been compelled to evacuate some very important positions, one of which was Pieter's Heights. Then the news came from Cape Colony that General Piet Cronje had been surrounded at Paardeberg, and that as he stubbornly refused to abandon his convoy and retreat, he would soon be compelled by a superior force to surrender.
During the war it was continually charged by both combatants that dum-dum bullets were being used, and undoubtedly there was ample foundation for the charges. Both Boers and British used that particular kind of expansive bullet notwithstanding all the denials that were made in newspapers and orations. After the battle of Pieter's Hills, on February 28th, Dr.
Buller's scheme for the operations of February 27, was an attack on Pieter's Hill by Barton, followed in succession by attacks on Railway Hill by Kitchener, and on Hart's Hill by Norcott, supported by artillery fire from the positions on the right bank.
Always the same extended advance, always the same rattle of Mausers and clatter of pom-poms from a ridge, always the same victorious soldiers on the barren crest, with a few crippled Boers before them and many crippled comrades behind. They were expensive triumphs, and yet every one brought them nearer to their goal. And now, like an advancing tide, they lapped along the base of Pieter's Hill.
At Pieter's Station the blood was still fresh on the grass where two hours before some of the South African Light Horse had been wounded. The Boers were still on Bulwana then? Perhaps, after all, we had better turn back and try to find that press-censor.
And then came all the horrors of that terrible struggle to reach the beleaguered town, culminating in the awful fight at Pieter's Hill. One after another, vainly trying to keep their cherished possession, parted with it bit by bit during those dreadful weeks; but one of them carried it all the time, and never so much as touched it.
On February 28th, while the fighting around Pieter's Hills was at its height, the British forces captured a Boer woman of nineteen years who had been fatally wounded. Before she died she stated that she had been fighting from the same trench with her husband, and that he had been killed only a few minutes before a bullet struck her.
The Boer position north of this section of the river stretched from Railway Hill, three-quarters of a mile west of the road, to Pieter's Hill. Along these crests they mounted heavy guns, a sustained fire from which, as is usual, preceded the attack.
The enemy was not entirely expelled, but those who remained disappeared during the night. Kitchener followed in Barton's track as far as the gorge which separates Pieter's from Railway Hill.
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