The sun is setting in glory over the great Drakensberg mountains, and so also that night set for ever the hopes of the Boer invaders of Natal.

Out of doubt and chaos, blood and labour, had come at last the judgment that the lower should not swallow the higher, that the world is for the man of the twentieth and not of the seventeenth century.

After a fortnight of fighting the weary troops threw themselves down that night with the assurance that at last the door was ajar and the light breaking through.
One more effort and it would be open before them.
Behind the line of hills which had been taken there extended a great plain as far as Bulwana--that evil neighbour who had wrought such harm upon Ladysmith.

More than half of the Pieters position had fallen into Buller's hands on the 27th, and the remainder had become untenable.
The Boers had lost some five hundred in killed, wounded, and prisoners.
[Footnote: Accurate figures will probably never be obtained, but a well-known Boer in Pretoria informed me that Pieters was the most expensive fight to them of the whole war.

] It seemed to the British General and his men that one more action would bring them safely into Ladysmith.
But here they miscalculated, and so often have we miscalculated on the optimistic side in this campaign that it is pleasing to find for once that our hopes were less than the reality.