intrepid coolness. Had those khaki-clothed warriors been carved out of
bronze and moved by machinery, they could not have shown less fear or more
perfect discipline. The pom-pom is a gun which I have been told the British
War Office refused as a toy some two years back. I have had the doubtful
pleasure of being under its fire to-day, and all I can say is that I would
gladly have given my place to any gentleman in the War Office who happens
to hold the notion that the pom-pom is a toy.

Somehow the enemy got hold of the position where General Rundle and staff
were located, and all the afternoon they swept the plain in front of the
tents, the hills above, and the hill opposite with shells; but they could
not quite drop one in the little ravine itself. Half an hour before sundown
I had to ride with two other correspondents to headquarters to get a
dispatch away. We got across safely, but had not been there five minutes
before a grandly directed shell sent the General and his staff off the brow
of the hill in double quick time. We delivered our dispatches, and were
getting ready for a gallop over the quarter mile of veldt, when, _pom,
pom, pom, pom_, came a dozen one-pounders a few yards away right across
our track. It made our hearts sit very close to our ribs, but there was
nothing for it but to take our horses by the head, drive the spurs home,
and ride as if we were rounding up wild cattle. I want it to stand on
record that I was not the last man across that strip of veldt. There was
not much incident in the day's fighting; there seldom is in an artillery
duel, carried on by men who know the game, in hilly country. Once during
the afternoon the big gun belonging to the Boers became so troublesome that
half a dozen of ours were trained upon it, and for best part of an hour it
sounded as if a section of Sheol had visited the earth, so deadly was the
fire, so fierce the bursting missiles, that not a rock wallaby, crouching
in its hole, could have lived twenty minutes in the location. We heard no
more from that gun.