Chapter 5

It must be said that the Boers made war like gentlemen of leisure; they restricted their hours of work with trade-unionist punctuality. Sunday was always a holiday; so was the day after any particularly busy shooting. They seldom began before breakfast; knocked off regularly for meals--the luncheon interval was 11.30 to 12 for riflemen, and 12 to 12.30 for gunners--hardly ever fired after tea-time, and never when it rained. I believe that an enterprising enemy of the Boer strength--it may have been anything from 10,000 to 20,000; and remember that their mobility made one man of them equal to at least two of our reduced 11,000--could, if not have taken Ladysmith, at least have put us to great loss and discomfort. But the Boers have the great defect of all amateur soldiers: they love their ease, and do not mean to be killed. Now, without toil and hazard they could not take Ladysmith.

To do them justice, they did not at first try to do wanton damage in town. They fired almost exclusively on the batteries, the camps, the balloon, and moving bodies of troops. In a day or two the troops were far too snugly protected behind schanzes and reverse slopes, and grown far too cunning to expose themselves to much loss.

The inhabitants were mostly underground, so that there was nothing really to suffer except casual passengers, beasts, and empty buildings. Few shells fell in town, and of the few many were half-charged with coal-dust, and many never burst at all. The casualties in Ladysmith during a fortnight were one white civilian, two natives, a horse, two mules, a waggon, and about half-a-dozen houses. And of the last only one was actually wrecked; one--of course the most desirable habitation in Ladysmith--received no less than three shells, and remained habitable and inhabited to the end.

And now what does it feel like to be bombarded?

At first, and especially as early as can be in the morning, it is quite an uncomfortable sensation.

You know that gunners are looking for you through telescopes; that every spot is commanded by one big gun and most by a dozen. You hear the squeal of the things all above, the crash and pop all about, and wonder when your turn will come. Perhaps one falls quite near you, swooping irresistibly, as if the devil had kicked it. You come to watch for shells--to listen to the deafening rattle of the big guns, the shrilling whistle of the small, to guess at their pace and their direction. You see now a house smashed in, a heap of chips and rubble; now you see a splinter kicking up a fountain of clinking stone-shivers; presently you meet a wounded man on a stretcher. This is your dangerous time. If you have nothing else to do, and especially if you listen and calculate, you are done: you get shells on the brain, think and talk of nothing else, and finish by going into a hole in the ground before daylight, and hiring better men than yourself to bring you down your meals. Whenever you put your head out of the hole you have a nose-breadth escape. If a hundredth part of the providential deliverances told in Ladysmith were true, it was a miracle that anybody in the place was alive after the first quarter of an hour. A day of this and you are a nerveless semi-corpse, twitching at a fly-buzz, a misery to yourself and a scorn to your neighbours.

If, on the other hand, you go about your ordinary business, confidence revives immediately. You see what a prodigious weight of metal can be thrown into a small place and yet leave plenty of room for everybody else. You realise that a shell which makes a great noise may yet be hundreds of yards away. You learn to distinguish between a gun's report and an overturned water-tank's. You perceive that the most awful noise of all is the throat-ripping cough of your own guns firing over your head at an enemy four miles away. So you leave the matter to Allah, and by the middle of the morning do not even turn your head to see where the bang came from.

XII.

THE DEVIL'S TIN-TACKS.

THE EXCITEMENT OF A RIFLE FUSILADE--A SIX-HOURS' FIGHT--THE PICKING OFF OF OFFICERS--A DISPLAY OF INFERNAL FIREWORKS--"GOD BLESS THE PRINCE OF WALES."

When all is said, there is nothing to stir the blood like rifle-fire. Rifle-fire wins or loses decisive actions; rifle-fire sends the heart galloping. At five in the morning of the 9th I turned on my mattress and heard guns; I got up.

Then I heard the bubble of distant musketry, and I hurried out. It came from the north, and it was languidly echoed from Cæsar's Camp. Tack-tap, tack-tap--each shot echoed a little muffled from the hills. Tack-tap, tack-tap, tack, tack, tack, tack, tap--as if the devil was hammering nails into the hills. Then a hurricane of tacking, running round all Ladysmith, running together into a scrunching roar. From the hill above Mulberry Grove you can see every shell drop; but of this there was no sign--only noise and furious heart-beats.

I went out to the strongest firing, and toiled up a ladder of boulders. I came up on to the sky-line, and bent and stole forward. To the right was Cave Redoubt with the 4·7; to the left two field-guns, unlimbered and left alone, and some of the Rifle Brigade snug behind their stone and earth schanzes. In front was the low, woody, stony crest of Observation Hill; behind was the tall table-top of Surprise Hill--the first ours, the second the enemy's. Under the slope of Observation Hill were long, dark lines of horses; up to the sky-line, prolonging the front leftward, stole half-a-dozen of the 5th Lancers. From just beyond them came the tack, tack, tack, tap.

Tack, tap; tack, tap--it went on minute by minute, hour by hour.

The sun warmed the air to an oven; painted butterflies, azure and crimson, came flitting over the stones; still the devil went on hammering nails into the hills. Down leftward a black-powder gun was popping on the film-cut ridge of Bluebank. A Boer shell came fizzing from the right, and dived into a whirl of red dust, where nothing was. Another--another--another, each pitched with mathematical accuracy into the same nothing. Our gunners ran out to their guns, and flung four rounds on to the shoulder of Surprise Hill. Billy puffed from Bulwan--came 10,000 yards jarring and clattering loud overhead--then flung a red earthquake just beyond the Lancers' horses. Again and again,--it looked as if he could not miss them; but the horses only twitched their tails, as if he were a new kind of fly. The 4·7 crashed hoarsely back, and a black nimbus flung up far above the trees on the mountain. And still the steady tack and tap--from the right among the Devons and Liverpools, from the right centre, where the Leicesters were, from the left centre, among the 60th, and the extreme left, from Cæsar's Camp.

The fight tacked on six mortal hours and then guttered out. From the early hour they began and from the number of shells and cartridges they burned I suppose the Boers meant to do something. But at not one point did they gain an inch. We were playing with them--playing with them at their own game. One of our men would fire and lie down behind a rock; the Boers answered furiously for three minutes. When they began to die down, another man fired, and for another three minutes the Boers hammered the blind rocks. On six hours' fighting along a front of ten or twelve miles we lost three killed and seventeen wounded. And, do you know, I really believe that this tack-tapping among the rocks was the attack after all. They had said--or it was among the million things they were said to have said--that they would be in Ladysmith on November 9, and I believe they half believed themselves. At any rate I make no doubt that all this morning they were feeling--feeling our thin lines all round for a weak spot to break in by.

They did not find it, and they gave over; but they would have come had they thought they could come safely. They began before it was fully light with the Manchesters. The Manchesters on Cæsar's Camp were, in a way, isolated: they were connected by telephone with headquarters, but it took half an hour to ride up to their eyrie. They were shelled religiously for a part of every day by Puffing Billy from Bulwan and Fiddling Jimmy from Middle Hill.

Every officer who showed got a round of shrapnel at him. Their riflemen would follow an officer about all day with shots at 2200 yards; the day before they had hit Major Grant, of the Intelligence, as he was sketching the country. Tommy, on the other hand, could swagger along the sky-line unmolested. No doubt the Boers thought that exposed Cæsar's Camp lay within their hands.

But they were very wrong. Snug behind their _schanzes_, the Manchesters cared as much for shells as for butterflies. Most of them were posted on the inner edge of the flat top with a quarter of a mile of naked veldt to fire across. They had been reinforced the day before by a field battery and a squadron and a half of the Light Horse. And they had one _schanze_ on the outer edge of the hill as an advanced post.

In the dim of dawn, the officer in charge of this post saw the Boers creeping down behind a stone wall to the left, gathering in the bottom, advancing in, for them, close order. He welted them with rifle-fire: they scattered and scurried back.

The guns got to work, silenced the field-guns on Flat Top Hill, and added scatter and scurry to the assailing riflemen. Certainly some number were killed; half-a-dozen bodies, they said, lay in the open all day; lanterns moved to and fro among the rocks and bushes all night; a new field hospital and graveyard were opened next day at Bester's Station. On the other horn of our position the Devons had a brisk morning. They had in most places at least a mile of clear ground in front of them. But beyond that, and approaching within a few hundred yards of the extreme horn of the position, is scrub, which ought to have been cut down.

Out of this scrub the enemy began to snipe. We had there, tucked into folds of the hills, a couple of tubby old black-powdered howitzers, and they let fly three rounds which should have been very effective. But the black powder gave away their position in a moment, and from every side--Pepworth's, Lombard's Nek, Bulwan--came spouting inquirers to see who made that noise. The Lord Mayor's show was a fool to that display of infernal fireworks. The pompon added his bark, but he has never yet bitten anybody: him the Devons despise, and have christened with a coarse name. They weathered the storm without a man touched.

Not a point had the Boers gained. And then came twelve o'clock, and, if the Boers had fixed the date of the 9th of November, so had we. We had it in mind whose birthday it was. A trumpet-major went forth, and presently, golden-tongued, rang out, "God bless the Prince of Wales." The general up at Cove Redoubt led the cheers. The sailors' champagne, like their shells, is being saved for Christmas, but there was no stint of it to drink the Prince's health withal. And then the Royal salute--bang on bang on bang--twenty-one shotted guns, as quick as the quickfirer can fire, plump into the enemy.

That finished it. What with the guns and the cheering, each Boer commando must have thought the next was pounded to mincemeat. The rifle-fire dropped.

The devil had driven home all his tin-tacks, and for the rest of the day we had calm.

XIII.

A DIARY OF DULNESS.

THE MYTHOPOEIC FACULTY--A MISERABLE DAY--THE VOICE OF THE POMPOM--LEARNING THE BOER GAME--THE END OF FIDDLING JIMMY--MELINITE AT CLOSE QUARTERS--A LAKE OF MUD.

_Nov. 11._--Ugh! What a day! Dull, cold, dank, and misty--the spit of an 11th of November at home. Not even a shell from Long Tom to liven it. The High Street looks doubly dead; only a sodden orderly plashes up its spreading emptiness on a sodden horse. The roads are like rice-pudding already, and the paths like treacle. Ugh! Outside the hotel drip the usual loafers with the usual fables. Yesterday, I hear, the Leicesters enticed the enemy to parade across their front at 410 yards; each man emptied his magazine, and the smarter got in a round or two of independent firing besides. Then they went out and counted the corpses--230. It is certainly true: the narrator had it from a man who was drinking a whisky, while a private of the regiment, who was not there himself, but had it from a friend, told the barman.

The Helpmakaar road is as safe as Regent Street to-day: a curtain of weeping cloud veils it from the haunting gunners on Bulwan. Up in the schanzes the men huddle under waterproof sheets to escape the pitiless drizzle. Only one sentry stands up in long black overcoat and grey woollen nightcap pulled down over his ears, and peers out towards Lombard's Kop. This position is safe enough with the bare green field of fire before it, and the sturdy, shell-hardened soldiers behind.

But Lord, O poor Tommy! His waterproof sheet is spread out, mud-slimed, over the top of the wall of stone and earth and sandbag, and pegged down inside the schanz. He crouches at the base of the wall, in a miry hole. Nothing can keep out this film of water. He sops and sneezes, runs at the eyes and nose, half manful, half miserable. He is earning the shilling a-day.

At lunch-time they began to shell us a bit, and it was almost a relief. At anyrate it was something to see and listen to. They were dead-off Mulberry Grove to-day, but they dotted a line of shells elegantly down the High Street. The bag was unusually good--a couple of mules and a cart, a tennis-lawn, and a water-tank. Towards evening the voice of the pompom was heard in the land; but he bagged nothing--never does.

_Nov. 12._--Sunday, and the few rifle-shots, but in the main the usual calm. The sky is neither obscured by clouds nor streaked with shells. I note that the Sunday population of Ladysmith, unlike that of the City of London, is double and treble that of week-days.

Long Tom chipped a corner off the church yesterday; to-day the archdeacon preached a sermon pointing out that we are the heaven-appointed instrument to scourge the Boers. Very sound, but perhaps a thought premature.

_Nov. 13._--Laid three sovs. to one with the 'Graphic' yesterday against to-day being the most eventful of the siege. He dragged me out of bed in aching cold at four, to see the events.

At daybreak Observation Hill and King's Post were being shelled and shelling back. Half battalions of the 1st, 60th, and Rifle Brigade take day and day about on Observation Hill and King's Post, which is the continuation of Cove Redoubts. To-day the 60th were on Leicester Post. When shells came over them they merely laughed. One ring shell burst, fizzing inside a schanz, with a steamy curly tail, and splinters that wailed a quarter of a mile on to the road below us; the men only raced to pick up the pieces.

When this siege is over this force ought to be the best fighting men in the world. We are learning lessons every day from the Boer. We are getting to know his game, and learning to play it ourselves.

Our infantry are already nearly as patient and cunning as he; nothing but being shot at will ever teach men the art of using cover, but they get plenty of that nowadays.

Another lesson is the use of very, very thin firing-lines of good shots, with the supports snugly concealed: the other day fourteen men of the Manchesters repulsed 200 Boers. The gunners have momentarily thrown over their first commandment and cheerfully split up batteries. They also lie beneath the schanzes and let the enemy bombard the dumb guns if he will--till the moment comes to fire; that moment you need never be afraid that the R.A. will be anywhere but with the guns.

The enemy's shell and long-range rifle-fire dropped at half-past six. The guns had breached a new epaulement on Thornhill's Kop--to the left of Surprise Hill and a few hundred yards nearer--and perhaps knocked over a Boer or two,--perhaps not. None of our people hurt, and a good appetite for breakfast.

In the afternoon one of our guns on Cæsar's Camp smashed a pompom. Fiddling Jimmy has been waved away, it seems. The Manchesters are cosy behind the best built schanzes in the environs of Ladysmith. Above the wall they have a double course of sandbags--the lower placed endwise across the stone, the upper lengthwise, which forms a series of loopholes at the height of a man's shoulder.

The subaltern in command sits on the highest rock inside; the men sit and lie about him, sleeping, smoking, reading, sewing, knitting. It might almost be a Dorcas meeting.

I won the bet.

_Nov. 14._--The liveliest day's bombardment yet.

A party of officers who live in the main street were waiting for breakfast. The new president, in the next room, was just swearing at the servants for being late, when a shell came in at the foot of the outside wall and burst under the breakfast-room. The whole place was dust and thunder and the half-acrid, half-fat, all-sickly smell of melinite. Half the floor was chips; one plank was hurled up and stuck in the ceiling. All the crockery was smashed, and the clock thrown down; the pictures on the wall continued to survey the scene through unbroken glasses.

Much the same thing happened later in the day to the smoking-room of the Royal Hotel. It also was inhabited the minute before, would have been inhabited the minute after, but just then was quite empty. We had a cheerful lunch, as there were guns returning from a reconnaissance, and they have adopted a thoughtless habit of coming home past our house. Briefly, from six till two you would have said that the earth was being shivered to matchwood and fine powder. But, alas! man accustoms himself so quickly to all things, that a bombardment to us, unless stones actually tinkle on the roof, is now as an egg without salt.

The said reconnaissance I did not attend, knowing exactly what it would be. I mounted a hill, to get warm and to make sure, and it was exactly what I knew it would be. Our guns fired at the Boer guns till they were silent; and then the Boer dismounted men fired at our dismounted men; then we came home. We had one wounded, but they say they discovered the Boer strength on Bluebank, outside Range Post, to be 500 or 600. I doubt if it is as much; but, in any case, I think two men and a boy could have found out all that three batteries and three regiments did. With a little dash, they could have taken the Boer guns on Bluebank; but of dash there was not even a little.

_Nov. 15._--I wake at 12.25 this morning, apparently dreaming of shell-fire.

"Fool," says I to myself, and turn over, when--swish-h! pop-p!--by the piper, it is shell-fire! Thud--thud--thud--ten or a dozen, I should say, counting the ones that woke me. What in the name of gunpowder is it all about? But there is no rifle-fire that I can hear, and there are no more shells now: I sleep again.

In the morning they asked the Director of Military Intelligence what the shelling was; he replied, "What shelling?" Nobody knew what it was, and nobody knows yet. They had a pretty fable that the Boers, in a false alarm, fired on each other: if they did, it was very lucky for them that the shells all hit Ladysmith. My own notion is that they only did it to annoy--in which they failed. They were reported in the morning, as usual, searching for bodies with white flags; but I think that is their way of reconnoitring. Exhausted with this effort, the Boers--heigho!--did nothing all day. Level downpour all the afternoon, and Ladysmith a lake of mud.

_Nov. 16._--Five civilians and two natives hit by a shrapnel at the railway station; a railway guard and a native died. Languid shelling during morning.

_Nov. 17._--During morning, languid shelling. Afternoon, raining--Ladysmith wallowing deeper than ever.

And that--heigh-h-ho!--makes a week of it. Relieve us, in Heaven's name, good countrymen, or we die of dulness!

XIV.

NEARING THE END.

DULNESS INTERMINABLE--LADYSMITH IN 2099 A.D.--SIEGES OBSOLETE HARDSHIPS--DEAD TO THE WORLD--THE APPALLING FEATURES OF A BOMBARDMENT.

_November 26, 1899._

I was going to give you another dose of the dull diary. But I haven't the heart. It would weary you, and I cannot say how horribly it would weary me.

I am sick of it. Everybody is sick of it. They said the force which would open the line and set us going against the enemy would begin to land at Durban on the 11th, and get into touch with us by the 16th. Now it is the 26th; the force, they tell us, has landed, and is somewhere on the line between Maritzburg and Estcourt; but of advance not a sign.

Buller, they tell us one day, is at Bloemfontein; next day he is coming round to Durban; the next he is a prisoner in Pretoria.

The only thing certain is that, whatever is happening, we are out of it. We know nothing of the outside; and of the inside there is nothing to know.

Weary, stale, flat, unprofitable, the whole thing. At first, to be besieged and bombarded was a thrill; then it was a joke; now it is nothing but a weary, weary, weary bore. We do nothing but eat and drink and sleep--just exist dismally. We have forgotten when the siege began; and now we are beginning not to care when it ends.

For my part, I feel it will never end.

It will go on just as now, languid fighting, languid cessation, for ever and ever. We shall drop off one by one, and listlessly die of old age.

And in the year 2099 the New Zealander antiquarian, digging among the buried cities of Natal, will come upon the forgotten town of Ladysmith. And he will find a handful of Rip Van Winkle Boers with white beards down to their knees, behind quaint, antique guns shelling a cactus-grown ruin. Inside, sheltering in holes, he will find a few decrepit creatures, very, very old, the children born during the bombardment. He will take these links with the past home to New Zealand. But they will be afraid at the silence and security of peace. Having never known anything but bombardment, they will die of terror without it.

So be it. I shall not be there to see. But I shall wrap these lines up in a Red Cross flag and bury them among the ruins of Mulberry Grove, that, after the excavations, the unnumbered readers of the 'Daily Mail' may in the enlightened year 2100 know what a siege and a bombardment were like.

Sometimes I think the siege would be just as bad without the bombardment.

In some ways it would be even worse; for the bombardment is something to notice and talk of, albeit languidly. But the siege is an unredeemed curse. Sieges are out of date. In the days of Troy, to be besieged or besieger was the natural lot of man; to give ten years at a stretch to it was all in a life's work; there was nothing else to do. In the days when a great victory was gained one year, and a fast frigate arrived with the news the next, a man still had leisure in his life for a year's siege now and again.

But to the man of 1899--or, by'r Lady, inclining to 1900--with five editions of the evening papers every day, a siege is a thousand-fold a hardship. We make it a grievance nowadays if we are a day behind the news--news that concerns us nothing.

And here are we with the enemy all round us, splashing melinite among us in most hours of the day, and for the best part of a month we have not even had any definite news about the men for whom we must wait to get out of it. We wait and wonder, first expectant, presently apathetic, and feel ourselves grow old.

Furthermore, we are in prison. We know now what Dartmoor feels like. The practised vagabond tires in a fortnight of a European capital; of Ladysmith he sickens in three hours.