NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE war has begun in earnest, and we have to chronicle three distinct actions which future military historians will probably call mountain engagements, but which, in the ex- citement of the hour, have been somewhat grandiloquently described as battles. But if the fights at Talana H ill, at Elandslaagte, and at Rietfoutein were not battles in the sense of those of the American Civil War,, or of the struggle between France and Germany, they were conducted with splendid courage on both sides. We were last week just able to record the affair at Glencoe. The course of events was as follows. General Symons—whose death in the hour of victory is a grave loss to his country—dis- covered on the day before the action that the Boers were advancing to attack him in three columns, from the North, from the East, and from the West. Knowing the extreme difficulty of timing such combinations, he resolved, if possible, to deal with the attack in detail. Fortune favoured this plan, for in the early hours of Friday General Erasmus with the Boers' westerncolumn seized Talana Hill overlooking the camp at Glencoe, mounted guns on the summit, and without wait- ing for his friends, began at the peep of dawn to bombard our position. General Symone, realising that this was a case in which attack was the beat form of defence, came to the bold and wise determination to drive the Boers from what they imagined was their impregnable position.
