ge, some of the Natal Volunteers, and when the train
from Maritzburg arrived about six the Rifle Brigade marched straight out
of it to join us. I climbed the kopje in front of them, and from there
could get a fine view of the whole position except the extreme flanks.

At 5.10 the first gun sounded from a battery on the right of our
centre--a battery that was to do magnificent work through the day. The
enemy's reply was an enormous puff of smoke from a flat-topped hill
straight in front of me. A huge shell shrieked through the air, and,
passing high above my head, burst slap in the middle of the town behind
me. Again and again it came. The second shot fell close to the central
hospital; the third in a private garden, where the native servants have
been busy digging for fragments ever since, as in a gold mine, not
considering how cheap such treasure is now likely to become. The range
was something over four miles. One of the shells passed so near the
balloon that the officer in the car felt it like a gust of wind. (I
ought to have told you about that balloon, by the way. We sent it up
first on Sunday morning, our Zulu savages opening their mouths at it,
beating their lips, and patting their stomachs with peculiar cries.)

"Long Tom" had come. "Long Tom," the hero of Dundee, able to hurl his
vast iron cylinder a clean six miles as often as you will. I saw him and
his brother gun on trucks at Sand River Camp on the Transvaal border
just before the war began. They say he is French--a Creusot
gun--throwing, some say 40lbs., some 95lbs., each shot. Anyhow, the
shell is quite big enough, whatever its weight, and it bangs into
shops, chapels, ladies' bedrooms without any nice distinctions. I could
see "Tom's" ugly muzzle tilted up above a great earthwork which the
Boers had heaped near a tree on the edge of that flat-topped hill, which
we may call Pepworth, from a little farm hard by.

Our battery was at once turned on to him, and though short at first, it
got the range, and poured the deadly shrapnel over that hill for hour
after hour. But other guns were there--perhaps as many as six--and they
replied to our battery, whilst "Tom" reserved his attention for the
town. Often we thought him silenced, but always he began again, just
when we were forgetting him, sometimes after over an hour's pause. The
Boer gunners, whoever they may be, are not wanting in courage. So the
artillery battle went on, hour after hour. I sat on the rock