The struggle was very fierce. Between nine and eleven the English charged three times with the bayonet and were repulsed. Under the deadly fire of the Mausers and the Maxim-Nordenfeldts they were obliged to fall back gradually, before any serviceable reinforcements had reached them. Woodgate, mortally wounded, was replaced by Colonel Thorneycroft; the latter received neither orders nor instructions, though it would have been easy to have established optical telegraph communication, as the heliograph was working between Mount Alice and Bester Farm (Redvers Buller and White).[#] [#] A heliograph _was_ working on the height, but ’the signallers and their apparatus were destroyed by the heavy fire’ (_vide_ Sir Charles Warren’s report).--TRANSLATOR. His position had become most critical; a council of war was hastily called, on the decision of which the height was evacuated under cover of night. On January 25 Sir Redvers Buller, who had hastened to Warren’s camp, was informed of this catastrophe, which upset all his combinations. A general retreat was determined on, and the troops recrossed the Tugela. After this bloody check, General Buller’s report of the movement is delicious: ’The fact that we were able to withdraw our ox-waggons and mule transports over a river 85 yards broad and with a rapid current, without any interference from the enemy, is, I think, a proof that they have learnt to respect the fighting powers of our soldiers.’ The ’lesson’ he had given the Boers had cost him 307 killed, thirty-one of whom were officers; 175 wounded, of whom forty-nine were officers; and 347 prisoners and missing, among them seven officers. The Boers had 168 men killed. And, as Ricciardi has pointed out, but for the incomprehensible opposition of General Joubert, this retreat across the Tugela would have been, not a proof that the enemy had learnt to respect the fighting powers of the English, but a terrific rout. For General Louis Botha, surrounded by a dozen guns, was watching the English passing over their pontoons from the heights he had defended the night before. They were well within range, and the gunners were at their posts. It wanted but an order, the pontoons would have been destroyed, and Warren’s division, hemmed in by the river, would have been massacred to a man. Why was this order not given? In March, even before the death of the Generalissimo, a terrible word had been whispered--treason! At any rate, his inaction was highly culpable, for if the struggle seems hopeless now, there was a time when he might have turned it into victory, and made it another Majuba Hill campaign.