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Updated: June 19, 2025
A young burgher, while riding behind a ridge and thus quite hidden from the enemy, was hit by a bomb, and both he and his horse were blown to atoms. This youth was a son of Mr. Gideon van Tonder, a member of the Executive Council. Another Lyddite shell so severely wounded two brothers, named Wolfaard, Potchefstroom burghers, that we almost despaired of their lives. Nevertheless, they recovered.
The dome of the tomb rose tall and prominent above the mud houses of the city. A lyddite shell burst over it a great flash, a white ball of smoke, and, after a pause, the dull thud of the distant explosion. Another followed. At the third shot, instead of the white smoke, there was a prodigious cloud of red dust, in which the whole tomb disappeared.
Amongst a number of wounded men brought down by our train from Modder River was a private of that fine corps, the R.M.L.I., who had, after passing through the perils of Graspan, suffered an extraordinary casualty at the Modder River fight. He was standing near one of the 47 guns which was firing Lyddite shells at the enemy's trenches.
I could see sandbags flying fifty feet in the air and what looked like men as well. Debris flew in every direction, and in a few minutes I could see neither sandbags nor parapets. Nothing but the yellow smoke of lyddite and behind this in the air a ring of fire where the shrapnel were bursting and showering their leaden curtain to keep the enemy's supports from coming up.
To-day the Union Jack hangs limp upon the flagstaff that rears its slender height over Nixey's, and the new year is some weeks old. The blue, blue sky of January is without a single puff of cloud, and the taint from the trenches is less sickening, unmingled with the poisonous fumes of the lyddite bursting-charges, and the acrid odour of smokeless powder.
Borne by comrades pick-a-back we saw the wounded carried along that passage too narrow for a litter. A splash of blood, a white bandage, a limp form! For the second permissible periscopes are tempting targets I looked through one over the top of the parapet. Another film! A big British lyddite shell went crashing into the German parapet.
The local Press was alarmingly eloquent on lyddite; we read not only of what it could do, but consistent accounts of what it had actually done. At a certain battle, for example, a lyddite shell fell among seventy Boers; and when the smoke cleared away only eight remained alive, seven of whom were asphyxiated by the fumes! We were glad that one escaped.
On the previous evening I had seen many dead dervishes lying in that vicinity. In their credulous faith in Mohamed Achmed they had flocked there for safety, only to be killed by our fire. Of 120 who were praying around the tomb when a 50-lb. Lyddite shell burst, but eighteen escaped alive, and these were sorely wounded.
Young Harcourt suddenly stepped forward from the crowd. "Here!" he cried with a smile of frank worship, as he tendered a fresh box of confetti. "Take this and remember Bunker Hill!" The British officer bowed. "I surrender," he said, "because you violate the rules of war. Your confetti is not deadly and your tactics are mediocre, but your eyes use lyddite."
He stood so, pointing down into the trench, and it seemed as though we could hear him calling upon the Boers behind it to surrender. A few minutes later the last of the three hills was mounted by the West Yorks, who were mistaken by their own artillery for Boers, and fired upon both by the Boers and by their own shrapnel and lyddite.
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