“Yes! of course they were, they knew it for eight hours, as it was five o’clock in the morning when they fired the first two shots, and it was one o’clock when we got to the top.” “Then it was not, as it is alleged, a sudden attack in force which gained the day?” The general smiled at my question. “How could it be when heavy firing was going on all the morning up to the very last moment.” “When the top was gained by the Boers, what took place next?” “There was no resistance, all was over in a minute or two.” “But tell me, general, how do you account for the fact that 500 English should run before 60 Boers who had just had an eight-hours’ climb up the mountain?” “I don’t wish to give any opinion,” said the general, looking serious indeed, “but I am certain the hand of God was with us all through.” Then waxing quite eloquent, he continued: “Men of mine, whom I knew were such cowards, that in Kafir wars even I have set them to cook the pots, advanced with determined step, impressed with the work before them, actuated, I am sure, by an Almighty power.” Then, continuing the narrative, he told me how General Smit sent him word about three o’clock that Colley was killed and how he forwarded instructions that the body should be carefully guarded during the night with “all honor and respect,” and that the wounded should be laid together and covered up, the prisoners of war in the meantime being sent under escort to the Boer camp and transported the next day by wagon to Heidleberg. Considering the state of utter demoralization in which our troops had apparently fallen at the time, the Boers having been victorious in every engagement of the campaign, all Englishmen may be glad that a sudden mist stopped the attack upon our camp at Mount Prospect, which General Smit told me the Boers had decided to make, or a yet more disastrous defeat would, I feel certain, have been chronicled. I was strongly impressed with the belief that General Joubert recognized a divine Providence in everything, as over and over again he said, “the hand of God was in it all.” I was also informed that when this sudden mist arose, hiding our camp completely from view, that he quietly said: “Look at the mist, the Lord won’t allow us to go;” seemingly, like Cromwell, he was a firm believer in the universality of divine interposition and so accepted the sudden mist as a command of the Deity! “Thus far shalt thou go and no further.”