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There are a few marks of shells, but so few and far between as not to attract attention, and you might walk all about the town without being struck by anything out of the common. I have sampled the roast-horse and roast-mule which the garrison seems to have been chiefly living on for the past five or six weeks, and find both pretty good, quite equal, if not superior, to the old trek-ox.
Eggs sprang up from a guinea to 30s. a dozen. Jam started at 30s. the 6lb. jar. Maizena was 5s. a pound. On the other hand, tobacco fell. Egyptian cigarettes were only 1s. each, and Navy Cut went for 4s. an ounce. During a siege one realises how much more than bread, meat, and water is required for health. Flour and trek-ox still hold out, and we receive the regulation short rations.
The lowest estimate of loss is £3,000, chiefly in transport cattle. But who knows whether by Christmas we shall not be glad even of a bit of old trek-ox? Probably the Dutch hope to starve us out. At intervals all morning they shelled the cattle near the racecourse, just for the sake of slaughter.
But the thorns are fast disappearing as firewood, and the appalling rain almost drowned me in the rush of the spruits. So we dined as usual on lumps of trek-ox thinly disguised.
"Oh no," I said; "the cry would cheat the Boers, perhaps; the bullocks would know better wouldn't they, Joeboy?" "Um? Big trek-ox laugh, and say `Gammon," replied the black, showing his glistening teeth. "Very well, then; when you are getting within earshot let Joeboy give three roars half-a-minute apart." "Right," I said. "You understand, Joeboy?" "Um? Yes, Boss Val."
A German farmhouse was an oasis of plenty amid a very hungry army. It made us sometimes wonder whether it was quite right to leave German ducks and fowls and sheep behind us, when we had to live on mealie meal and tough trek-ox. But the women were so terrified, at first, that we gave such farms a wide berth when scarcity of water did not force us to camp within the enclosures.
I wish they had more time to visit the remnants of battalions defending the hills out in cold and rain all night, out in the blazing sun all day, with nothing to look forward to but a trek-ox or a horse stewed in unseasoned water, two biscuits or some sour bread, and a tasteless tea, generally half cold. No beer, no tobacco, no variety at all.
Their meal that night was a miserable affair, since in the first place provisions were running short and there was little to eat, and in the second no one spoke a word. Benita could swallow no food; she was weary of that sun-dried trek-ox, for since Meyer had blocked the wall they had little else.
The standard of speed is the trek-ox, lurching pensively along under his yoke, very exacting about his mealtimes, and with no high notions about supreme efforts, when he has to get his waggon out of a bad drift. He often prefers to die, and while he is making up his ponderous mind he may be blocking up a column, miles in length, of other waggons in single file.
After varying my trek-ox rations by catching a kind of barbel with a worm in the yellow Klip, I went again to Observation Hill, and with the greater interest because every one was saying two of the Boer camps were in flames. Of course it was a lie. The camps stood in their usual places quite undisturbed. January 22, 1900. Twelve weeks to-day since Black Monday, when our isolation really began!
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