Colonel Hamilton, who had ridden out with his staff, and accompanied by Colonel F. Rhodes, to the highest knoll of Bester's Ridge, grasped the situation quickly and ordered up reinforcements. The Boers who had crept round the crest of the eastern steep, which I have called by its Kaffir name Intombi, were even then almost up to the camp that Colonel Hamilton had quitted half an hour earlier, but screened from the Manchester battalion's fire by a swell of the ground in front. Their further progress, however, was stayed by a counter attack from Border Mounted Rifles and Natal Volunteers whom Colonel Royston brought up to reinforce the Frontier Police under Major Clark, who had been holding that point with dogged determination since dawn. The brigadier, seeing that for a time no headway was being made by the enemy against Caesar's Camp, turned his attention towards Waggon Hill and sent Lord Ava forward to reconnoitre from the spot where Colonel Edwardes, with the main body of Imperial Light Horse, reduced to less than half its original strength by losses in former actions, was making a gallant effort to relieve the remnants of two squadrons from their perilous plight on Waggon Hill. Lord Ava watched its issue from the fighting line beside men with whom he had scaled the rough heights of Elandslaagte and the stiffer steeps of Gun Hill. As he raised himself upon a small boulder to look through glasses at the enemy, who were pouring in a hail of bullets from a distance of little more than 150 yards, a bullet struck him in the forehead, and there he lay, apparently lifeless, with every sense dead to the din of war about him. A few minutes later Colonel Frank Rhodes heard that a staff-officer had been hit. He came at once to the conclusion that it was the young friend who had been his companion daily since they sailed from England early in September. As he went forward to make sure, Lieutenant Lannowe, of the 4th Dragoon Guards, aide-de-camp to Colonel Hamilton, joined him, and these two, passing unscathed across the shot-torn slopes, found Lord Ava lying sorely wounded, but still alive, where Boer bullets were falling thickest about the Imperial Light Horse. They carried him to a place of less danger, and there Colonel Rhodes bandaged the wound, while a skilful surgeon's aid was being summoned. By that time Majors Julian, of the Royal Army Medical Corps, and Davis, medical officer of the Imperial Light Horse, had their hands full, having rendered aid to many wounded men under the heaviest fire, utterly regardless of danger to themselves. The first operation, without which recovery would have been hopeless, was, however, performed there, while Mauser bullets whistled through the air, and Lord Ava, still unconscious, was borne from the field.