Then began the excitement. Everyone was wide awake in a moment and curious to see how the new Brigadier would manage his first job. The convoy was halted, and the troops drawn on under cover of a slight and almost imperceptible rise in the ground. Riding on in advance I suddenly came on the scouts in action, that is to say, their horses were picketed in rear of them, and they were lying hidden in the long grasses. And there you have a typical picture of this kind of warfare. A row of men lying on the ground, for no apparent reason, chewing the long stalks and talking quietly to each other; in front a flat and seemingly vacant ground; profound silence reigning everywhere. But use your glasses, and you will see what looks like a shadow, but is really a rise on the ground, giving advantage enough for the extermination of an army; show your head, and you will hear the bang and whirr of the Mauser. Presently the jingle of harness sounded behind me, and the guns went by to take up a position on the left. I followed behind them in shelter of the ridge, and therefore out of sight of the position. When I saw it again I found that we were facing three long low mounds, running north and south across our path, and the attack was now being developed. The infantry, so dense a mass when marching, were now strung out in long lines sweeping towards the left, and Lord Chesham with two squadrons had also gone far to the left, to try to get round the position. Meanwhile the guns were unlimbered, and their anxious crew (the battery had never been in action before) were on tenter-hooks. Up rides a staff officer. "Shell that ridge on the left." "Right, sir. Sight for 1,800. Fuse six--no, six and a half," says the nervous subaltern. "Fire, number one gun! Fire, number two gun!" Then two shattering explosions, the suspense of six seconds, the burst of shrapnel in the air, the cloud of brown dust rising where it struck, and the hollow "boom" coming back when all was over. These exercises were repeated with much zeal by the subaltern and his crew, until after about fifty rounds had been fired the order came to cease fire; and it was afterwards ascertained that, as the net result of this commotion, one partridge had been shot. But I know of another result. A certain subaltern member of the Royal Regiment of Artillery sat thereafter a little straighter on his horse than he had sat a week ago. But while the noise was going on, for all we knew, the Boers might be suffering heavily from the shrapnel; although we rather thought not, since no one was shooting back at the guns. Meanwhile the infantry was threading out to the left, from which direction a shot now and then sounded; and the remark of the onlookers (the onlooker is invariably a critic) was, "Why is he committing all his force to a left-flank turning movement, leaving only a hundred and fifty men to watch his centre and right, when there may be only a dozen men on that left kopje?"