All the men with Lieutenant Crane behaved very well. Two non-commissioned officers and eleven troopers went with him to hold the isolated kopje on the right flank. Of this gallant party of fourteen, three were killed, four were wounded and taken prisoners, four escaped with their clothes riddled with bullet-holes but otherwise unhurt; one, Corporal Firth, could have escaped, but preferred to remain with his wounded officer, to bind up his wounds if possible, to go with him into captivity perhaps, to share death with him if need be. Troopers Reginald Macdonald and Leslie Gwatkin Williams also performed deeds of splendid self-sacrifice. Of those who escaped, Sergeant-Major Marsham (wounded), Bugler McKenzie, Sergeant Walker, Lance-Sergeant J.S. Elliott (wounded), and Trooper Radford, whose parting shot while he sat in the saddle brought a Boer down, are deserving of the highest praise for the way in which they stuck to the led horses and rode off with them under heavy fire. These men were not tried veterans; they were taking their parts in the first battle of their first campaign. But several of them had been friends from their youth up, and all of them were Anglo-Indians—men whose exile from the land of their birth serves but to intensify their love for England and her greatness. Loyalty to friend and country! This is the magic touchstone of the soldier’s discipline and heroism. [Illustration: _Photo: J. Charlesworth_ J.H. BURN-MURDOCH ] Should any cynic dare to say that the men who did these deeds were thirsting for glory, or inspired by a hope of winning the Cross for Valour, or even conscious of doing more than a common soldier’s duty demanded, let him read the narrative of their actions, as told by themselves or their comrades, and be answered! In the whole literature of war I know nothing more realistic than Trooper Burn-Murdoch’s description of the incident in which he was a half-unconscious participator; when lying wounded he was taken from under fire by Captain Chamney, and finally carried out of action on horseback in that officer’s arms. The story is too characteristic of the battlefield to bear mutilation. For the sake of space, though with reluctance, some picturesque passages must be sacrificed; but, for the rest, as Trooper Burn-Murdoch told it originally in his letters to the ‘Englishman,’ he shall tell it again here: