If they be not quite so mobile in the field as more experienced troops, there is no doubt that they present a determined front to the fire of the enemy. They have a keen relish for any preparation which appears to lead to some immediate collision, while they profess an equally profound disgust at their enforced inactivity. How these men might act if, through the smoke-filled air, they saw an array of sparkling bayonets, or heard the serried ranks of hostile lines advancing to the charge, it is impossible to say; but in the few fights which we have had the personal element has been strong, and the individual courage high. We have lacked the spectacle of the many-coloured, steel-edged columns impelled forward by the impulse of some dominant power, with the dusty faces of the men, the stumbling, sore-stricken feet, the gasping breath of the stragglers who tired, dead beat, and thirsty, limp to the rear; but the play of human passion in our little fighting force has not been absent. We have had the wager of life against life, the angry, turbulent crash of fierce-blooded men, fighting under the shadow of death, with their emotions strained as they struggled in the very atmosphere of passion. And it has done us good to see how reliable the force has been about which so much doubt existed. Unlike the Imperial service, these irregular corps act as much for the unit as they do for the mass, as animated by terror or by valour, by a fatal despair, or by a blooded triumph, they fight for an individual supremacy. That is the moment of their triumph, and it is these splendid qualities of savage and physical animalism which makes it more easy to treat them with a wider latitude than is usual. Their magnificent hardihood, their splendid fighting gifts, their lurid blasphemy, their admiration for officers who are men, their appalling debauchery, gives to them the ideal setting of the rough but very gallant soldier of fortune, who, scorning his enemy and hating a retreat, has played so omnipotent a part in the history of the universe. CHAPTER XI CANNON KOPJE MAFEKING, _October 31st, 1899_.