Pole-Carew – Tucker – Snipers – The Looted Farm – Taking of Brandfort – Artillery Engagement – Advance of the Guards – The Wounded Scout – The Dead Australian – Return.

Stand in the pass at Karee, and look north in the clear fresh morning air! Before you lies a great plain, dull green, with white farmhouses scattered here and there. One great donga slashes across it. Distant hills bound it on all sides, and at the base of those in front, dimly seen, are a line of houses and a steeple. This is Brandfort, 10 miles off, and we are advancing to attack it.

The troops are moving forward, line after line of red face and khaki, with rumbling columns of guns. Two men sit their horses beside us on a knoll, and stare with their glasses at the distant houses. Gallant figures both of them; the one spruce, debonnaire, well-groomed, with laughing eyes and upward-curved moustache, a suggestion of schoolboy mischief about his handsome face; the other, grim, fierce, all nose and eyebrow, white scales of sun-dried skin hanging from his brick-red face. The first is Pole-Carew, General of Division; the second is Brigadier Stephenson. We are finding our men, and these are among them.

Here is another man worth noting. You could not help noting him if you tried. A burly, broad-shouldered man, with full, square, black beard over his chest, his arm in a sling, his bearing a medieval knight-errant. It is Crabbe, of the Grenadier Guards. He reins his horse for an instant while his Guardsmen stream past him.