If it was stopped after 50 or 100 meters “the consequences would have been unequivocally tragic. The fact that the driver left the zone of fire was what saved his life,” he said.

With these advantages it would seem morally impossible that forty-four men could withstand the unceasing stream of shells, the mist of bullets, which comprised the zone of fire of which the kopje was the centre.

The men who charged through this zone of fire suffered terribly, and the conclusion must have forced itself upon their minds that they were going to their death.

With no little heroism the stretcher-party, which was under Sergeant-Major Dowling, a resident physician in Cape Town, who volunteered his services for the campaign, and who has charge of the subsidiary hospital in the native location, made their way across the zone of fire to the doors of the hospital.

Seeing that the second emplacement was outside the enemy's present zone of fire, Burnet had the machine-gun quickly restored to its former position.