On the return trip,
as the English approached this curve the Boers opened fire with
artillery and pompoms. The engineer, in his eagerness to escape,
rounded the curve at full speed, and, as the Boers had expected, hit
the rock. The three forward cars were derailed, and one of them
was thrown across the track, thus preventing the escape of the
engine and the two rear cars. From these Captain Haldane, who
was in command, with a detachment of the Dublins, kept up a
steady fire on the enemy, while Churchill worked to clear the
track. To assist him he had a company of Natal volunteers, and
those who had not run away of the train hands and break-down
crew.
"We were not long left in the comparative safety of a railroad
accident," Churchill writes to his paper. "The Boers' guns, swiftly
changing their position, reopened fire from a distance of thirteen
hundred yards before any one had got out of the stage of
exclamations. The tapping rifle-fire spread along the hills, until it
encircled the wreckage on three sides, and from some high ground
on the opposite side of the line a third field-gun came into action."
For Boer marksmen with Mausers and pompoms, a wrecked
railroad train at thirteen hundred yards was as easy a bull's-eye as
the hands of the first baseman to the pitcher, and while the engine
butted and snorted and the men with their bare bands tore at the
massive beams of the freight-car, the bullets and shells beat about
them.
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