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.
Even when we could ride out ten or a dozen miles into the country, there
was little that was new, nothing that was interesting. Now we lie in the
bottom of the saucer, and stare up at the pitiless ring of hills that
bark death. Always the same stiff, naked ridges, flat-capped with our
intrenchments--always, always the same. As morning hardens to the brutal
clearness of South African mid-day, they march in on you till Bulwan
seems to tower over your very heads. There it is close over you, shady,
and of wide prospect; and if you try to go up you are a dead man.
Beyond is the world--war and love. Clery marching on Colenso, and all
that a man holds dear in a little island under the north star. But you
sit here to be idly shot at. You are of it, but not in it--clean out of
the world. To your world and to yourself you are every bit as good as
dead--except that dead men have no time to fill in.
I know now how a monk without a vocation feels. I know how a fly in a
beer-bottle feels.
I know how it tastes, too.
And with it all there is the melinite and the shrapnel. To be sure they
give us the only pin-prick of interest to be had in Ladysmith. It is
something novel to live in this town turned inside out.
Where people should be, the long, long day from dawn to daylight shows
only a dead blank.
Where business should be, the sleepy shop-blinds droop. But where no
business should be--along the crumbling ruts that lead no
whither--clatters waggon after waggon, with curling whip-lashes and
piles of bread and hay.
Where no people should be--in the clefts at the river-bank, in bald
patches of veldt ringed with rocks, in overgrown ditches--all these you
find alive with men and beasts.
The place that a month ago was only fit to pitch empty meat-tins into is
now priceless stable-room; two squadrons of troop-horses pack flank to
flank inside its shelter. A scrub-entangled hole, which perhaps nobody
save runaway Kaffirs ever set foot in before, is now the envied
habitation of the balloon. The most worthless rock-heap below a
perpendicular slope is now the choicest of town lots.
The whole centre of gravity of Ladysmith is changed. Its belly lies no
longer in the multifarious emporia along the High Street, but in the
earth-reddened, half-in visible tents that bashfully mark the
commissariat stores. Its brain is not the Town Hall, the best target in
Ladysmith, but Headquarters under the stone-pocked hill. The riddled
Royal Hotel is its social centre no longer; it is to the trench-seamed
Sailors' Camp or the wind-swept shoulders of Cæsar's Camp that men go to
hear and tell the news.
Poor Ladysmith! Deserted in its markets, repeopled in its wastes; here
ripped with iron splinters, there rising again into rail-roofed,
rock-walled caves; trampled down in its gardens, manured where nothing
can ever grow; skirts hemmed with sandbags and bowels bored with
tunnels--the Boers may not have hurt us, but they have left their mark
for years on her.
They have not hurt us much--and yet the casualties mount up. Three
to-day, two yesterday, four dead or dying and seven wounded with one
shell--they are nothing at all, but they mount up. I suppose we stand at
about fifty now, and there will be more before we are done with it.
And then there are moments when even this dribbling bombardment can be
appalling.
I happened into the centre of the town one day when the two big guns
were concentrating a cross-fire upon it.
First from one side the shell came tearing madly in, with a shrill, a
blast. A mountain of earth, and a hailstorm of stones on iron roofs.
Houses winced at the buffet. Men ran madly away from it. A dog rushed
out yelping--and on the yelp, from the other quarter, came the next
shell. Along the broad straight street not a vehicle, not a white man
was to be seen. Only a herd of niggers cowering under flimsy fences at a
corner.