blankets, with tins and cooking things, and broken bottles and all sorts
of rags and debris littered about. The descriptions of the place sent
home after the battle are necessarily very inaccurate. Those I have seen
all introduce several lines of trenches and an elaborate system of
barbed wire entanglements. There is only one trench, however, and no
barbed wire, except one fence along a road. There are, however, a great
number of plain wire strands, about ten yards long perhaps, made fast
between bushes and trees, and left dangling, say, a foot from the
ground. They were not laid in line, but dotted about in every direction,
and, in anything like a dim light, would infallibly trip an advancing
enemy up in all directions. The single trench is about five feet deep,
the back of it undercut so as to allow the defenders to sleep in good
shelter, and the number of old blankets and shawls lying here showed it
had been used for this. It followed closely the contour of the hill,
about twenty yards from its base. Eastward it was continued across the
flat to the river.

The "disappearing guns," in the same way, were not disappearing at all.
They simply had strong redoubts of sandbags built round them, the
opening in front being partly concealed by bushes. On each side of the
gun, inside the redoubt, was a pit, with a little side passage or
tunnel, where two or three gunners could lie in perfect security, and
yet be ready at an instant's notice to serve their gun. As for the
kopjes themselves, every rock and stone there was split with shell and
starred with bullet marks. The reverse side of the slopes were steepened
with stone walls here and there, as a protection against shrapnel, and
sangars and lookout places were built at points of vantage. Altogether,
though not so elaborate as one had been led to believe, the defences
struck one as extremely practical and business-like.