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He shows with regret how the shell cut in half a marvellous little Burmese lady, whose robes once swept down his arm in glorious blues and reds, but are now lapped over the bone as "flaps." Another patient was a shaggy, one-eyed old man, between whose feet a Bulwan shell exploded one afternoon as he was walking down the main street.
On paper, therefore, we had a great advantage. But we had to economise ammunition, not knowing when we should get more, and also to keep a reserve of field-guns to assist any threatened point. Also their guns, being newer, better pieces, mounted on higher ground, outranged ours. We had more guns, but they were as useless as catapults: only the six naval guns could touch Pepworth's Hill or Bulwan.
To-night the varied smell all over the town is hardly endurable. January 12, 1900. A quiet day again. Hardly a gun was fired. Wild rumours flew the Boers were trekking north in crowds they were moving the gun on Bulwan all lies! I spent the whole day trying to induce a Kaffir to risk his life for £15. A Kaffir lives on mealie-pap, varied by an occasional cow's head.
At last a cipher message began to come through on the heliograph. There was immense excitement at the Signal Station. The figures were taken down. Colonel Duff buttoned the precious paper in his pocket. Off he galloped to Headquarters. Major De Courcy Hamilton was called to decipher the news. It ran as follows: "Kaffir deserter from Boer lines reports guns on Bulwan and Telegraph Hills removed!"
Sometimes six or seven big shells have thundered so close to this little chapel, that the special kind of torture to which I was being subjected had for a time to be interrupted. Really nothing worthy of note has happened, except the building by the Boers of an incomprehensible work beside the Klip at the foot of Bulwan. About 300 Kaffirs labour at it, with Boer superintendents.
At lunch "Bulwan Billy" made some splendid shots close to our little mess and burst the tanks at Taylor's mineral water works. In the wet afternoon the big gun's work was less dignified. He threw five shrapnel over the cattle licking up what little grass was left on the flat, and did not kill a single cow. The guides boast that to-day they killed one Boer by strategy used for tigers in India.
When our signalling stopped, they turned it on the town, and very courteously lighted me home. It was like the clearest moonlight, the shadows long and black, but all else distinct in colourless brilliance. The top of Bulwan is four miles from our main street. To make up for yesterday the shells were particularly lively to-day.
The Boer searchlight on Bulwan was sweeping the half circle of the English defences from end to end, and now and then it opened its full white eye upon us, as though the enemy wondered what we were doing there. We were laying to rest a man of assured, though unaccomplished genius, whose heart had still been full of hopes and generosity.
Sunday is the one day when they can stay at home with safety, and leave their husbands to skulk in the river holes if they please. December 21, 1899. "Puffing Billy," of Bulwan, distinguished himself this morning by sending one shot into Colonel Ward's house and the next into the general's just beyond. In Colonel Ward's was a live Christmas turkey, over which a sentry is posted day and night.
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.
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