Firing began two miles out of Pretoria, and pom-poms and guns played merrily all day, clearing the range which divided the two columns. We camped twelve miles out. The plan for next day subsequently transpired to have been that General Hamilton should make a frontal attack and drive the enemy off the high ground, where they had taken up a position, near Zilikat’s Nek, while our brigade, making a wide movement, to the right, was to cut off the retiring foe from the Schwartz and Roode Kopjes, to which they were expected to retreat. Apparently something went wrong with the arrangements, for Hamilton, attacking before we got into position, lost some twenty men and the Boers escaped. The point at which General Hamilton made his attack was from the south side of the Magaliesberg range near Uitval Nek, which the enemy held strongly. As General Mahon’s brigade was moving along the north side of those precipitous ridges through a country thick with scrub, no communication could be kept up between the two forces, and Hamilton, whose march was unimpeded by natural difficulties, had not allowed sufficient time for his colleague to cover the treacherous ground through which many tributaries of the Crocodile River run their devious courses. On getting touch with the enemy, whose position he had located, Ian Hamilton went for them at once, a portion of Cunningham’s brigade making as if for a frontal attack, while two companies of the Berkshire Regiment, led by Major Elmhirst Rhodes, gallantly escaladed the steep cliff overlooking the pass from its eastern side. Hamilton’s losses in this fight amounted to forty killed and wounded before the Boers could be dislodged; but as soon as they found that their position was under fire from above, where the Berkshires had gained a footing, the enemy fled, abandoning their waggons and horses. Unfortunately, delayed by the obstacles already mentioned, Mahon’s mounted troops did not come up in time to take any part, otherwise but few of the enemy could have escaped. A correspondent of the ‘Times of India,’ taking up the story a day after this fight, when General Mahon’s force had got through the denser bush country into a more smiling region only to find that the enemy had disappeared, writes: