As may be imagined the situation was now verging on disaster. Major Oldfield had received his death-blow, Captain Fitzgerald was helpless with a bullet in the thigh, Lieutenant Belcher was shot at his guns. The gunners and drivers of the guns had nearly all dropped dead or were disabled--their horses in death agonies strewing the ground. It was impossible, therefore, to remove the guns. The Bushmen had been forced to retire at a critical moment, and it seemed as though the day were lost. Then up came the C.I.V. Battery, and with the assistance of Captain Budworth--whose wits and gallantry were never better displayed--fired their two guns trail to trail over the heads of the 38th, battered the triumphantly advancing foe on the left front and, in a word, saved the situation. Off scudded the Boers, after them went the Bushmen, Budworth riding at the head, and finally with the assistance of the Infantry--the Yorkshire Light Infantry, the Munster Fusiliers, and the Imperial Yeomanry who had rushed up the hills and scattered the remaining Dutchmen at the point of the bayonet--they succeeded in getting the guns limbered up and away! The dashing work cost forty killed and wounded, besides Captain Dill, 2nd Yorkshire Light Infantry, wounded, and Lieutenant and Adjutant A. F. C. Williams, Indian Staff Corps (Attached Brabant's Horse), dangerously wounded. [Illustration: RAILWAY MAP OF EASTERN PORTION OF ORANGE RIVER COLONY AND NATAL. (Scale, 1 inch=64 miles. By permission of the Publishers of "South Africa.")] On the following day, 4th, the enemy was pursued as far as Blaauw Kop, fifteen miles north-west of Bethlehem, where Mr. Steyn's seat of government was now supposed to be. Mr. Steyn had cautiously betaken himself to Fouriesburg (between Bethlehem and Ficksburg), leaving De Wet and some 3000 men to await the attack of the British forces. Meanwhile round Ficksburg fierce fighting was taking place, the Boers making a midnight attack with the despairing idea of reoccupying that town. Their furious effort lasted but an hour, when they found themselves beaten. On the 5th the position at Doornberg, on the Winburg-Senekal road, which the Dutchman had evacuated, was promptly taken possession of by General Brabant, who thereby ousted them from a vantage-point whence they could pounce on convoys proceeding to and from the base at Winburg, and secured the line of rail in the vicinity of Zand River, round which hovering gangs of wreckers had persistently congregated.