Michel has calculated the ranges, and we fire all Friday night. The points aimed at are: the searchlights, Cecil Rhodes' house, the Grand Hotel, the last high chimney on the left, and that on the right.
Erasmus was unable to suppress a gentle amusement at the sight of our preparations for night-firing. But when he grasped the idea that we were in earnest, and that his Long Tom was being loaded, the benevolent smile with which one would watch a spoilt child engaged in some innocent folly changed to a look of real anxiety. He thought poor Michel had gone mad. He finally got used to the novel proceeding.
Firing ceased on both sides about 12.30 a.m. Early on Saturday morning it began again. One of our shells fell on the De Beers magazine, transformed into an ammunition factory, and caused an explosion and a fire.
The English, despairing of silencing our Long Tom with their Long Cecil, replied to every shot at the town by a shell into our laager. The accuracy of their fire with this gun at a range of about 7,000 metres was remarkable. We were indeed a capital target: a green rectangle of 200 metres in the midst of a yellow, arid plain.
The shell arrived in thirty-four seconds, but did no great damage, for a watchman gave the alarm, 'Skit!' each time when he saw the smoke, and we retreated into shelter.
The telegraphists of the staff, who were working in a little house, were placed in communication with the watchman by means of a bell, and, warned half a minute before the arrival, they had time to take refuge in a neighbouring trench.
We learnt later that a similar system had been adopted in Kimberley as a protection against Long Tom, and hence the small number of killed during the siege. One of the first victims of Long Tom, however, was the engineer of the Long Cecil, who had just finished his work. A shell burst on his house and killed him in his bedroom. Another cause of the slight mortality on both sides was the bad quality of the fuses for the projectiles, which often burst imperfectly, or not at all. Thus, one of the English shells fell in the machinery of the waterworks, only a few inches from our reserve of a hundred shells, and happily failed to explode. Another went through a cast-iron pipe, over a centimetre thick, and buried itself in the earth without exploding; its fuse was completely flattened on the projectile by contact with the pipe.
Nevertheless, a good many, too many indeed, did burst with satisfactory results--to those who fired them.
A good many of the Boers accordingly took the precaution of digging a sort of tomb several feet deep, in which they piled mattresses and blankets. They spent all night and part of the day lying in this shelter.
On Saturday morning, on arriving at the battery, we were surprised by a whistling sound. The English, harassed by the fire of Long Tom, had dug trenches during the night to a distance of about 1,200 yards, and had manned them with riflemen. Their fire was not yet very galling, because of the distance between us.