dragged by twenty-two splendid oxen. We soon moved on a mile or two
farther, crossed one of the worst spruits I remember, climbed a very
steep hill, and came into action just on its brow, firing at a distant
ridge. All this time the infantry had been advancing on either flank
in extended order.

_(3.30 P.M.)_--We and the 38th and the cow-guns, as they are called,
have been raining shell on the Boer positions and on their guns. The
situation, as I see it, is this: we are exactly opposite the mouth of
the nek, stretching back into the mountains like a great grass road,
bordered with battlements of precipitous rock, which at this end--the
gate we are knocking at--swell out on either side into a great natural
bastion of bare rock. On these are the Boer trenches, tier above tier,
while their guns are posted on the lower ground between. It looks an
impregnable position. The Royal Irish, I hear, are attacking the right
hand bastion; the Munsters, I think, the left, and there is a
continuous rattle of rifle-fire from both.

Our teams, waggons, and limbers, have been shell-dodging under the
brow of the hill. They have fallen all around us, but never on us.
One, which I saw fall, killed five horses straight off, and wounded
the Yeomanry chap who was holding them. We have shifted position two
or three times; it is windy, and very cold. A new and unpleasant
experience in the shape of a pom-pom has come upon the scene. Far off
you hear pom-pom-pom-pom-pom, five times, and directly afterwards,
like an echo, pom-pom-pom-pom-pom in your neighbourhood, five little
shells bursting over an area of about eighty yards, for all the world
like a gigantic schoolboy's cracker. The new captain of the unlucky
38th has been hit in two places by one.