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Chermside's brigade occupied the same position on the east. Two other divisions and the cavalry stood round, alert and eager, like terriers round a rat-hole, while all day the pitiless guns crashed their common shell, their shrapnel, and their lyddite into the river-bed.
Commander McClure began to figure that it was getting too dangerous longer to risk his thin-skinned vessel before the rain of the lyddite bombs, and accordingly gave orders to submerge. Jamming their guns back into their deck casings, the crews melted away through the hatches into the hold of the Dewey. Ballast poured in through the valves and the ship began to submerge.
All the same, it was pretty bad, but not anything like so accurately calculated, or so mechanically efficient as our later efforts in this line. The precise time-table methods of the present period did not exist then, but the main idea of giving the Opposition as much heavy lyddite, followed by shrapnel, was the same. At about half-past six, as we sat in the sap, we heard the first shell go over.
Reorganization gives the demagogue his chance; and often his literary lyddite strikes close. But Rogers was great enough to know that the penalty of success must be paid. He took his medicine, and smiled. Time was when a millionaire was a man worth a million dollars. But that day is past. Next, a millionaire was a man who made a million dollars a year. That, too, is obsolete.
This hope was of short duration, for Sergeant Matthews, in charge of the Mounted Police depôt, soon came and told me natives reported several hundred Boers at Kraipann, only ten miles away. He said they were lying in wait for the second armoured train, which was expected to pass to Mafeking that very night, carrying the howitzers so badly needed there, and some lyddite shells.
This alacrity was not consistent with their earlier diatribes against military despotism; but the fact was that since "lyddite" had been found out the experts were chary of making it, and the public still more chary of drinking it. There was some risk in selling it, too, so clear the course for the "Law." The second proclamation was all of wax and tallow.
In haste they killed them and started to skin them desperately; but they had half done when a lyddite shell bursting close to them turned the mutton yellow with its fumes and it had to be abandoned reluctantly. The sufferings of the wounded are heartrending. Little children huddled together in bomb-proof excavations are restless, hungry and crying.
A hundred yards distant, on our right, the navy guns were firing lyddite that burst with a thick yellow smoke; on the other side Colt automatics were put-put-put-ing a stream of bullets; the field-guns and the howitzers were playing from a hill half a mile behind us, and scattered among the rocks about us, and for two miles on either hand, the infantry in reserve were firing off ammunition at any part of the three hills they happened to dislike!
But their comrades felt they had not died wholly in vain; for the woeful lack of lyddite shells thus became known in England and the indignation thus aroused resulted in the appointment of a minister of munitions who organized the manufacture of the necessary explosives on a scale heretofore unattempted by the British. A lesson had been learned, but at a fearful cost to life.
When we got on to the pier, which ends in the River Clyde, we found another destroyer, the Wolverine, under Lieutenant-Commander Keyes, the brother of the Commodore. Not a bit of it! No sooner had he got us aboard than he came out boldly and very, very slowly, stern first, from the lee of the River Clyde and began a duel against Asia with 4-inch lyddite from the Wolverine's after gun.
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