On the 28th, Ladysmith was relieved, and the Boers went back to the Biggarsberg Mountains. General White in Ladysmith could plainly see a line of wagons fifteen miles long, yet he made no move to delay or capture them. Worn out and exhausted as the Boers really were, I do not believe that Buller would have been successful in relieving Ladysmith had they not received the report of General Cronje's surrender at Paardeberg on the 27th. This news was deeply felt, and it so thoroughly discouraged the Boers that they lost heart and left positions without orders, which they could have easily continued to hold. To relieve General White and his 12,000 skeletons, General Buller had exploded hundreds of tons of Mr. Chamberlain's lyddite and lost as many men as he succeeded in relieving. Mr. Chamberlain was a big winner, the English heavy losers, and the Tugela Valley is now renowned as an Irish graveyard. A few more wars like the South African would settle all of Ireland's many troubles, because the Irish would all be laid under the sod. How strange it is that a people who have fought against England's tyranny for centuries to secure their freedom, and are still fighting for the same end, will voluntarily join with their old and detested oppressor to deprive another people of their liberty, knowing, too, as they must, that in every instance they weaken themselves and strengthen their old enemy. Yet, this is exactly what the Irish have done, and I have no sympathy for those who are to-day sleeping in the Tugela Valley as a result of their own voluntary acts. During a terrific rain storm on the night of the 27th, and in the very eyes of Buller's army on one side and White's on the other, our Irish boys were the chief instruments in pulling down Long Tom from the top of Bulwana Kop. It was fearful and exasperating work, and it was not until two o'clock in the morning that our large gun safely landed at the foot of the kop and started on its way to Elandslaagte. General Botha was near at hand with some 300 or 400 men, but he could have offered little or no resistance had an attempt been made to capture the gun. Our hundreds of wagons, with all our cannon and maxims, were hauled through heavy mud and across an open flat for twenty miles, and safely landed in the Biggarsberg Mountains, and that, too, in the very presence and before the eyes of an English army of 45,000 trained officers and men, who never moved an inch in our direction.