Before dawn Lord Dundonald with a mounted brigade and a battery of artillery moved to the east, while General Hart and his brigade started to try and cross Brindle Drift. The field-guns came next with cavalry--the 1st Royals and 13th Hussars--to protect either flank. Major-General Hildyard's brigade advanced to occupy the post of honour in the centre of the theatre of war. On the right were the West Surrey with the West Yorks in support. On the left marched the Devons with the East Surrey in rear. At 6 A.M. the Naval Contingent opened the proceedings. Their 12-pounders began to snort and to roar, and lyddite whizzed and shrieked over to Grobler's Hill and in the neighbourhood of Fort Wylie. But it whizzed and shrieked in vain. The Boers were "mum." They were "lying low," and had determined to keep their position masked as long as possible. They adopted the same tactics which had so confounded us at Majesfontein. The infantry now advanced, while Colonels Long and Hunt made haste--undue haste, as lamentable experience proved--to come into line with their field-batteries. At this moment, when all seemed to be going well, when Hart's, Hildyard's, and Barton's brigades were moving to their several positions, the sudden combined roar of Boer artillery and musketry was heard, coming not, as might have been supposed, from the distance, but _from the immediate front_, and apparently from all sides. A very cyclone of Mauser bullets swept all around, rattling and barking from the river bank, from trenches north and south of the Tugela, from Fort Wylie, and from every available point of vantage. Flame in tongues and forks belched out as from a crackling bush. The advancing infantry--the Devons and the West Surrey--found themselves almost carried off their feet; leaden hail beat the dust around, digging deep into the earth and sending up spurts of blinding dust, or whistling a warning of death to the heart of many an honest lad and true. So deadly, so awful was this fusillade, that it seemed impossible to do aught but flee. Yet the gunners stood tight to their guns, and the infantry with set faces like masks of bronze, regardless of the companions that dropped thick and fast around and upon them, stared Death straight in the face--stared at and recognised and knew him, and still maintained their ground! More--they advanced; nearer and ever nearer to the invisible enemy they came, afterwards lying down and returning the fire with interest, while the guns of Long's and Hunt's field-batteries boomed and bellowed and vomited fire like Inferno released. Fort Wylie and its neighbourhood were swept with shrapnel and almost silenced, but only for a moment. Disaster was in the air. The concealed sharpshooters of the enemy, who crowded the Boer lines, had applied themselves to making a concentrated attack on the guns, picking off horses and officers and men, and finally reducing the snorting weapons which had been galloped too quickly into action, and were within