We had a very pretty fight at the Zand River, and were within an ace of taking two of the enemy’s big guns. To begin at the beginning. We had marched the previous day from our camp near Smaldeel to within about five miles of the Zand River. On our arrival there we heard that the Australians and Oxfords had been having a skirmish with some Boers at the bridge, and had seized a train of stores, but were forced to retire. Starting at daybreak in the second line of Mounted Infantry, we got across the drift all right, and drove the Boer outposts back. We sat on the further side of the river for about an hour, watching them bring up two big guns on to a kopje about three miles off, and wondering when we should be shelled. Presently we were ordered off on a flank movement, and after trotting some miles came in touch with the enemy. We dismounted, and moved up a valley with good cover, the pom-poms following. They drove back the Boer riflemen and presently silenced a gun, which had been amusing itself by shelling our led horses, but luckily without effect. We mounted again and started for a two-mile gallop to get up with their gun, but it had disappeared. Making a flank movement round the shoulder of the position they had occupied, and pushing on some distance, we found them again, or rather they found us first. Their gun got our range beautifully, but every shell seemed to fall and burst between the horses. Of course we were widely extended. Retiring, we dismounted and then advanced on foot, but their rifle fire and shell fire was too hot; so again we tried to out-flank their position. A Company and half of B Company advanced, and we climbed a small kopje with a deserted Kaffir kraal on top; Loch’s Horse, some of the Australians, and the West Riding Mounted Infantry went round and took up a position further along the ridge. We sat there for nearly two hours under a terrific shell fire, till it dawned on us to move below the brow. For the first half-hour they landed shell after shell (40-pounders) right into the middle of us; luckily, very few burst properly. If they had fired shrapnel, which bursts in the air, or lyddite, we should all have been blown off the top. They then let our horses have a few shots, and killed two and wounded three. In the meantime urgent messages were being sent for our artillery, or at least the pom-poms that generally come with us, but unfortunately they could get nothing but a walk out of their horses, and the Boers quietly trekked away. We ought to have had them with the greatest of ease, as we were well round them on two sides and a brigade was moving somewhere on the third. If the Artillery had got up in time we could easily have moved round the fourth side. We tried to keep in touch with the Boers when they retired, but it soon got dark and we had to stop.