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Another carried away the heavy stone porch of the Anglican Church, and, at dinner-time, "Silent Susan" made a mark on the hotel, but it was empty. Just before midnight the guns began again. I watched them flashing from Bulwan and the other hills, but could not mark what harm they did. It was a still, hot night, with a large waning moon.
They hoped either to rush the place, or to keep us where we were. The 13th Battery, stationed at the railway cutting, opened upon them, and the pickets of the Gloucesters and the Liverpools checked them with a very heavy fire. As I watched the fighting from the hill above my cottage, the sun appeared over Bulwan, and a great gun fired upon us with a cloud of purple smoke.
One perfect specimen of a 96lb. shell from Bulwan fell into a soft flower bed and did not burst or receive a scratch. I suppose it cost the Boers about £35, and it would still fetch £10 as a secondhand article. A brother to it pitched into a boarding house close by us, and blew the whole gable end sky high. Unhappily two of the inmates were wounded, and a horse killed.
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.
I mention this peculiar fact for the benefit of future ornithologists, who might otherwise be puzzled at his form of song. Another interesting event in natural history occurred a short time ago up the Port road. A Bulwan shell, missing the top of Convent Hill, lobbed over and burst at random with its usual din and circumstance.
As it was New Year's eve, we expected a midnight greeting from the Boer guns, and sure enough, between twelve and one, all the smaller guns in turn took one shot into vacancy and then were still. January 1, 1900. The Bulwan gun began the New Year with energy.
Then the tearing scream: horror! it was coming from Bulwan. Again the annihilating blast, and not ten yards away. A roof gaped and a house leaped to pieces. A black reeled over, then terror plucked him up again, and sent him running. Head down, hands over ears, they tore down the street, and from the other side swooped down the implacable, irresistible next.
The tents of another large camp showed among the bushes on Lombard's Nek, where the Helpmakaar road passes between Lombard's Kop and Bulwan, and many waggon laagers were in sight beyond. At the foot of the flat-topped Middle Hill on the south-west, the Boers have placed two more guns to trouble the Manchesters further. But our defences along the whole ridge are now very strong.
He is a red Irishman, born at Maidstone, and has done eleven years' service. During the attack on the 6th he was sitting beside his gun waiting for Major Abdy's word to fire in his turn, when a 96lb. shell from "Bulwan" struck him in its flight, and shattered his left arm and leg. He says he was knocked silly, and felt a bit fluttered, but had no pain till they lifted him into the dhoolie.
In the afternoon one of the bluejackets was also seriously wounded by shrapnel. The bombardment was heavy all day, the Bulwan gun firing right over Convent Hill and plunging shells into the Naval Camp, the Leicesters, and the open ground near Headquarters. It looks as if a spy had told where the General and Staff are to be found. The market quotations at this evening's auction were fluctuating.
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