our dangerous time. If you
have nothing else to do, and especially if you listen and calculate, you
are done: you get shells on the brain, think and talk of nothing else,
and finish by going into a hole in the ground before daylight, and
hiring better men than yourself to bring you down your meals. Whenever
you put your head out of the hole you have a nose-breadth escape. If a
hundredth part of the providential deliverances told in Ladysmith were
true, it was a miracle that anybody in the place was alive after the
first quarter of an hour. A day of this and you are a nerveless
semi-corpse, twitching at a fly-buzz, a misery to yourself and a scorn
to your neighbours.

If, on the other hand, you go about your ordinary business, confidence
revives immediately. You see what a prodigious weight of metal can be
thrown into a small place and yet leave plenty of room for everybody
else. You realise that a shell which makes a great noise may yet be
hundreds of yards away. You learn to distinguish between a gun's report
and an overturned water-tank's. You perceive that the most awful noise
of all is the throat-ripping cough of your own guns firing over your
head at an enemy four miles away. So you leave the matter to Allah, and
by the middle of the morning do not even turn your head to see where the
bang came from.

XII.

THE DEVIL'S TIN-TACKS.

THE EXCITEMENT OF A RIFLE FUSILADE--A SIX-HOURS' FIGHT--THE PICKING
OFF OF OFFICERS--A DISPLAY OF INFERNAL FIREWORKS--"GOD BLESS THE
PRINCE OF WALES."

When all is said, there is nothing to stir the blood like rifle-fire.
Rifle-fire wins or loses decisive actions; rifle-fire sends the heart
galloping. At five in the morning of the 9th I turned on my mattress and
heard guns; I got up.

Then I heard the bubble of distant musketry, and I hurried out. It came
from the north, and it was languidly echoed from Caesar's Camp. Tack-tap,
tack-tap--each shot echoed a little muffled from the hills. Tack-tap,
tack-tap, tack, tack, tack, tack, tap--as if the devil was hammering
nails into the hills. Then a hurricane of tacking, running round all
Ladysmith, running together into a scrunching roar. From the hill above
Mulberry Grove you can see every shell drop; but of this there was no
sign--only noise and furious heart-beats.

I went out to the strongest firing, and toiled up a ladder of boulders.
I came up on to the sky-line, and bent and stole forward. To the right
wa