t him, and then "the men with the assegais" came
galloping after them. A Boer without his horse came running along,
and, pulling him out, took his place behind the stone. A soldier
galloped along and called out, "Hallo, Johnny, what are you doing
here? You'll get hurt." Then, catching sight of the Boer, he stuck him
down through the back as he passed. "Ah, baas, great fight--plenty
much blood."

Wounds or death by Mauser bullets, or even by the thrust of a lance,
are not to be compared, from the point of view of their
pain-inflicting possibilities, with what may be done in that way by
the fragment of a shell. That's the thing that hurts. Shell fire,
speaking generally, is the "Bogy of Battle" to those not accustomed to
it. The main purpose it accomplishes is to "establish a funk." When
the actual damage done by shell fire after a battle is counted up and
the number of shells fired, the results are most surprising. A poet in
the _Ladysmith Lyre_ wrote--

"One thing is certain in this town of lies:
If Long Tom hits you on the head you dies."

You do--unquestionably; but perhaps it is worse still to get a piece
of a shell somewhere else. What frightful wounds they make sometimes!
what mangled butchery in their track! See some poor fellow stretched
on the operating-table, stripped for the patching or trimming which
half-helpless surgery can supply. Apart from head and hands, which are
sure to be khaki-colour with dirt caked in with sweat, the average
Tommy usually presents a fine specimen of the human form divine--what
is there finer in the world than the body of a well-shaped, muscular
man? I always prefer the figure of the fighting gladiator to that of
the Apollo Belvedere--and then, when shell fragments tear this body,
it looks like some unspeakably unhallowed sacrilege. The horribly
unlucky way these fragments seem to go in--an uncouth and butchering
way instead of the gentlemanly puncture of the Mauser. One afternoon a
young fellow galloped past me in the main street of Ladysmith. He had
just got opposite the Town Hall hospital, when a shell from Bulwana
burst right under his horse. When the cloud of dust and smoke cleared
away, we found the horse lying on the road completely disembowelled,
and the poor fellow flung on to the footpath, with a long piece of
shell sticking in his side. As he was taken into the hospital he said,
"This means two more Dutchmen killed." But the wound was obviously
fatal; there was no