‘Dear Sir Charles,--We got up about four o’clock, and rushed the position with three men wounded. There were some few Boers, who seemed surprised, and bolted after firing a round or so, having one man killed. I believe there is another somewhere, but have not found him in the mist. The latter did us well, and I pushed on a bit quicker than I perhaps should otherwise have done, lest it should lift before we got here. We have intrenched a position, and are, I hope, secure; but fog is too thick to see, so I retain Thorneycroft’s men and Royal Engineers for a bit longer. Thorneycroft’s men attacked in fine style. I had a noise made later to let you know that we had got in. ‘Yours &c., ‘E. WOODGATE.’ Lieut.-Colonel àCourt expressed himself as quite satisfied that the summit could be held--‘held till doomsday against all comers,’ he said to Mr. Bennet Burleigh. Not long after General Woodgate had written his letter to Sir Charles Warren the Boer fire grew very hot, and he fell mortally wounded. Colonel Blomfield of the Lancashire Fusiliers was also wounded soon after, and Colonel Crofton of the Royal Lancasters, as senior officer, then assumed the command. As the mist cleared, it became evident to those below and on Three Tree Hill that the schanzes held by our men on the top were exposed to both frontal rifle fire and to shell fire from the left front, and that a good deal of fighting was going on. Sir Charles Warren therefore directed Major-General Coke to send up the Imperial Light Infantry, who were posted at the foot of the hill, to reinforce Colonel Crofton, the Dorset Regiment taking their place at the foot. A little before ten o’clock a message was received by Sir Charles Warren from Colonel Crofton which ran as follows: ‘Reinforce at once or all lost. General dead.’ Sir Charles Warren replied: ‘I am sending two battalions, and the Imperial Light Infantry are on their way up. You must hold on to the last. No surrender.’ It is due to Colonel Crofton to state that the message he ordered to be sent was, he says: ‘General Woodgate dead; reinforcements urgently required.’ The message was not written down by him, or by the signalling officer, and it is impossible to trace how the alteration occurred. The Dorset Regiment was then sent up, and subsequently the Middlesex Regiment. Sir Charles Warren went over to see Major-General Coke and directed him to go up himself to Spion Kop and, as Commander of the 5th Division and of the right attack, take command of the troops there--some 5,500 men. Major-General Coke left for Spion Kop about 11 A.M., and arrived on the slopes, some 600 feet below the summit, at noon.