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Updated: May 12, 2025
The great event was the appearance of a new "Long Tom" on the Bulwan. He is to be called "Puffing Billy," from the vast quantity of smoke he pours out. Nothing else of great importance happened. Major Grant, of the Intelligence, was slightly wounded while sketching on the Manchesters' ridge. Coolies wandered about the streets all day with tin boxes or Asiatic bundles on their heads.
They were well within range of our 12-pounder, and the middy in charge was very anxious to have a shot, but Major Goulburn decided not to waste ammunition in breaking up that tea party or 'dop raad. I confess this seemed to me a mistake, for Boers were sniping across Bester's Valley with such persistency that we had to keep a sharp watch on our knee-haltered ponies lest they should stray towards the dangerous zone, where one man of the Manchesters was killed directly he showed himself.
By all the laws of war they ought to have tumbled back anyhow, but by the laws of the Manchesters they hung on and declared they could do so for ever. How to help? Men! Men, not so much now to sustain the Manchesters as to force back the Turks who were enfilading them from the "Haricot" and from that redoubt held for awhile by the R.N.D. on their right.
The Doc he always smiles and twinkles his eyes so merry like when he sounds me chest. I'm thinkin' of havin' it turned inter a risin' sun. Me troop thinks it is an 'ell of a good joke, an' I reckon it would be too if it was on some one else's chest. Them b Manchesters!"
On the south-east side of the gap, a barricade ran up a steep slope to the trenches of other Manchesters, whose assault was to be simultaneous with ours. Owing to the clearance of the fire trenches, the assaulting parties had, unfortunately, to move across the open.
The organisation is admirable, but one feels it comes a little late in the day. The same is true of the new biscuit tins which are to be put up as letter-boxes about the camp for a local post, and of the new plan of making sandals for the men out of flaps of saddles and the buckets for cavalry carbines. For a fortnight past, 120 of the Manchesters have gone barefoot among the rocks.
How the Boers got there one can only imagine, for neither the Imperial Light Horse pickets on Waggon Hill, nor the Manchesters holding the very verge of that cliff which we call Cæsar's Camp and the Kaffirs Intombi, nor the mixed force of volunteers and police watching the scrub lower down, saw any form or heard a movement during the night.
After all, the rifle, as Napoleon said, is the only thing that counts, and to-day we had a great deal of it at various points in our long line of defence. That line is like a horseshoe, ten to twelve miles round. The Manchesters suffered most. Since the investment began the enemy has never left them in peace.
First the French were shelled and bombed out of the "Haricot"; next the right of the Naval Division became uncovered and they had to give way, losing many times more men in the yielding than in the capture of their ground. Then came the turn of the Manchesters, left in the lurch, with their right flank hanging in the air.
The men came back sick with disappointment, and more shaken than by defeat. I found the Manchesters building small and almost circular sangars of stones and sandbags at intervals all along the ridge.
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