United States or Ireland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It stirred the hazy stillness at dawn this morning like sweet music. It grew louder and apparently nearer as the morning advanced, until in imagination one could mark the positions of individual batteries pounding away opposite Colenso and Skiet's drift. At last the roar died away in sullen growls, giving us the hope that a position had been gained. February 6.
Heliograph signals have been twinkling spasmodically, but their language is written in a sealed book. We only know that these "helios" come not from kopjes this side of Tugela, nor from the former signal-station south of Potgieter's and Skiet's Drifts, as they did a few days ago, but from hills near Weenen, as in the months before Buller crossed the Tugela, thus indicating a retrograde movement.
Again at daybreak we hear the guns of our relieving force at work in a vigorous cannonade away to the south-west, where Skiet's Drift lies. They quicken at times to twenty shots a minute, the field batteries chiming in faintly between the rounds of heavier artillery. From Observation Hill we can see the enemy's Creusot on a notched ridge by Doom Kloof replying.
And yet another story makes out that numbers of the enemy attempting to fall upon Buller's supply column at Skiet's Drift were completely annihilated. The Standard and Diggers' News could hardly beat this for imaginative ingenuity. It does not reassure us. On the contrary a general feeling of depression seems to have set in, caused perhaps by the ennervating weather.
Skiet's Drift is a difficult way, leading through a bushy country scarred with dongas and commanded by successive ridges, of which the Boers, with their great mobility and rapidity of concentration, know how to make the most. They still hold Monger's Hill, and their big gun has opened again from the notched ridge by Doom Kloof.
Word Of The Day