nd not allowed to come back to their accustomed lines at
night. All afternoon one met parties of them strolling aimlessly about
the roads or up the rocky footpaths--poor anatomies of death, with
skeleton ribs and drooping eyes. At about seven o'clock two or three
hundred of them gathered on the road through the hollow between Convent
Hill and Cove Redoubt, and tried to rush past the Naval Brigade to
the cavalry camp, where they supposed their food and grooming and
cheerful society were waiting for them as usual. They had to be driven
back by mounted Basutos with long whips, till at last they turned
wearily away to spend the night upon the bare hillside.

[Illustration: INDIAN BAKERY]

_January 31, 1900._

Again the sky was clouded, and except during an hour's sunshine in the
afternoon no heliograph could work. But below the clouds the distance
was singularly clear, and one could see all the Dutch camps, and the
Boers moving over the plain. The camps are a little reduced. Only four
tents are left in the white string that hung down the side of Taba
Nyama.

Two parties, of forty Boers apiece, passed north along the road behind
Telegraph Ridge whilst I was on Observation Hill in the morning. But
there was no special meaning in their movements, and absolutely no news
came in. Only rumours, the rumours of despair--Warren surrounded,
Buller's ammunition train attacked and cut to pieces, the whole
relieving force in hopeless straits.

In the town and camps things went on as usual, under a continued weight
of depression. The cold and wet of the night brought on a terrible
increase of dysentery, and I never saw the men look so wretched and
pinched. When officers in high quarters talk magnificently about the
excellent spirits of the troops, I think they do not always realise what
those excellent spirits imply. I wish they had more time to visit the
remnants of battalions defending the hills--out in cold and rain all
night, out in the blazing sun all day, with nothing to look forward to
but a trek-ox or a horse stewed in unseasoned water, two biscuits or
some sour bread, and a tasteless tea, generally half cold. No beer, no
tobacco, no variety at all. To me, one of the highest triumphs of the
siege is the achievement of MacNalty, a young lieutenant of the Army
Service Corps. For nights past he has been working in the station engine
shed at an apparatus of his own invention for boiling down horses into
soup. After many