January 1, 1900.
The Bulwan gun began the New Year with energy. He sent thirty of his enormous shells into the camps and town, eight or nine of which fell in quick succession among the Helpmakaar fortifications, now held by the Liverpools.
Three or four houses in the town were wrecked by shells, the most decisive ruin being at Captain Valentine's. The shell went through the iron verandah, pierced the stone wall above the front door without bursting, and exploded against the partition wall of the passage and drawing-room. Throwing forward, it cleared away the kitchen wall, and swept the kitchen clean. Down a passage to the right the expansion of the air blew off a heavy door, and threw it across the bed of a wounded Rifle Brigade officer. He escaped unhurt, but a valued servant from the Irish Rifles got a piece of shell through back and stomach as he was preparing breakfast in the kitchen. He died in a few hours. His last words were, "I hope you got your breakfast all right, sir."
The house had long been a death-trap. Perhaps the Boers aim at the telegraph-office across the road, or possibly spies have told them Colonel Rhodes goes there for meals. The General has now declared the place too dangerous for habitation.
In the afternoon we were to have had a military tournament on the Islington model, but the General stopped it, because the enemy would certainly have thrown shells into our midst, and women and children would have been there. At night, however, the Natal Volunteers gave another open-air concert. In the midst we heard guns—real guns—from Colenso way. Between the reflected flash on the sky and the sound of the report one could count seventy-eight seconds, which Captain Lambton tells me gives a distance of about fifteen and a half miles. All day distant guns were heard from time to time. Some said the direction was changed, but I could hear no difference.
The mayor and councillors relieve the monotony of the siege with domestic solicitude. To-day they are said to be preparing a deputation to the General imploring that the first train which comes up after the relief shall be exclusively devoted—not to medical stuff for the wounded, not to food for the hungry troops and fodder for the starving horses, not to the much-needed ammunition for the guns—but to their own women.
January 2, 1900.
Soon after daylight dropping bullets began to whiz past my window and crack upon the tin roof in quite a shower. The Boer snipers had crept up into Brooks's Farm, beyond the Harrismith railway, and were firing at the heads of our men on Junction Hill. Whenever they missed the edge of the hill the bullets fell on my cottage. At last some guns opened fire from our Naval battery on Cove Redoubt. Captain Lambton had permitted the Natal Naval Volunteers to blaze away some of their surplus ammunition at the snipers. And blaze they did! Their 3-pounders kept up an almost continuous fire all the morning, and hardly a sniper has been heard since. There was nothing remarkable about the bombardment.
"Puffing Billy" gave us his four doses of big shell as usual. Whilst I was at the Intelligence Office a shell lit among some houses under the trees in front, killed two and wounded others. The action of another shell would seem incredible if I had not seen it. The thing burst among the 13th Battery, which stands under shelter of Tunnel Hill, in a straight line with my road, less than 300 yards away. I was just mounting my horse and stopped to see the burst, when a fragment came sauntering high through the air and fell with a thud in the garden just behind me. It was a jagged bit of outer casing about three inches thick, and weighing over 6 lbs. The extraordinary thing about it was that it had flung off exactly at right angles from the line of fire. Gunners say that melinite sometimes does these things.
I rode south-west, over Range Post and a bit of the Long Valley to Waggon Hill, our nearest point to the relief column and the English mail. At no great distance—ten miles or so—I could see the hills overlooking the Tugela, where the English are. Far beyond rose the crags and precipices of the Drakensberg, illuminated by unearthly gleams of the setting sun, which found their way beneath the fringes of a purple thunder-shower and turned to amber-brown a cloud of smoke rising from the burning veldt.