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.