Boers, as usual, sprang up from all round. We had fought for three hours, and had twenty-five killed and seventeen wounded. Of these, seven only had been hit by the shrapnel and rifle-fire from the _front_. All the rest had been killed or hit from the _flanks_, where there should be few enemies, or the _rear_, where there should be none! This fact convinced me that my preconceived notions as to the _front_, and its danger relative to the other points of the compass, needed considerable modification. All my cherished ideas were being ruthlessly swept away, and I was plunged into a sea of doubt, groping for _something_ certain or fixed to lay hold of. Could Longfellow, when he wrote that immortal line, "Things are not what they seem," ever have been in my position? The survivors were naturally a little disheartened at their total discomfiture, when all had started so well with them in their "crack." This expressed itself in different ways. As one man said to a corporal, who was plugging a hole in his ear with a bit of rag-- "Somethink sickening, I call it, this enfilading racket; you never know which way it will take yer. I'm fairly fed up." To which the gloomy reply, "Enfiladed? Of course we've been enfiladed. This 'ere trench should have been wiggled about a bit, and then there would not have been quite so much of it. Yes, wiggled about--that's what it should have been." To which chipped in a third, "Yes, and somethink to keep the blighters from shooting us in the back wouldn't 'ave done us much 'arm, anyway." There were evidently more things in _earth_ than I had hitherto dreamt of in my philosophy! * * * * * As we trekked away to the north under a detached guard of Boers, many little points such as the above sank into my soul, but I could not for some time solve the mystery of why we had not succeeded in surprising the enemy. There were no men, women, children, or Kaffirs who knew of our arrival, who could have warned them. How did they spot our presence so soon, as they evidently must have done when they stopped and consulted in the morning? It was not until passing Incidentamba, as I casually happened to look round and survey the scene of the fight from the enemy's point of view, that I discovered the simple answer to the riddle. There on the smooth yellow slope of the veldt just south of the drift was a brownish-red streak, as plain as the Long Man of Wilmington on the dear old Sussex downs, which positively shrieked aloud, "Hi! hi! hi!--this way for the British defence." I then grimly smiled to think of myself sitting like a "slick Alick" in that poster of a trench and expecting to surprise anybody! Besides having been enfiladed and also taken in reverse, we had again found ourselves at a disadvantage as compared with the concealed enemy shooting at close range, from having to show up at a fixed place in order to fire. Eventually I collected the following lessons: