Wet, cold, weary, and without food for twenty-six hours, the bedraggled Tommies stood yelling and waving, amid the litter of dead and of dying.
It was a near thing.

Had the ridge fallen the town must have followed, and history perhaps have been changed.

In the old stiff-rank Majuba days we should have been swept in an hour from the position.

But the wily man behind the rock was now to find an equally wily man in front of him.
The soldier had at last learned something of the craft of the hunter.

He clung to his shelter, he dwelled on his aim, he ignored his dressings, he laid aside the eighteenth-century traditions of his pigtailed ancestor, and he hit the Boers harder than they had been hit yet.