one and unaided for four long months? Will they remember that we
are situated practically in the centre of a desert, 600 miles from
the coast, and have been compelled from the beginning to depend on
our own resources, and that our lives are daily and hourly exposed
to danger? Is it unreasonable, when our women and children are being
slaughtered and our buildings fired, to expect something better than
that a large British army should remain inactive in the presence of
eight or ten thousand peasant soldiers? Surely the time has come to
put in plain English the plain truths of the situation. We have been
influenced in the past by various considerations, notably a desire
to avoid compromising what is called the 'Military Situation.' We
have now come to the conclusion that respect for the 'Military
Situation' merely means deceiving our own people. The Press
correspondents cabling to the London papers are actually not
permitted to mention that Kimberley has been bombarded by a six-inch
gun! This is indeed the last straw, and if only for the sake of
future record we take this opportunity of placing the naked truth
before our readers."

Lively indeed was the satisfaction which greeted this unexpected change
of policy. But there was little time for jubilation, for after breakfast
the shells came whistling through the air. They were delivered in a
desultory fashion, and in the afternoon at still less frequent
intervals. Happily, little damage was done and firing ceased at sunset.
It was over for the week; the prospective respite of thirty-six hours
was a pleasing thought; the morrow would be Sunday, and Sunday was
sacred. Precedent and our sense of the fitness of things alike justified
the assumption. But it did not occur to us that the chimes of midnight
were yet many hours off, nor that from eight o'clock to twelve the
unkindest cut of all was to be administered.

There was something terribly unearthly in the sound of the whizzing
destroyers as they careered across the houses in the blackness of the
silent night. This was the hardest strain of all, and more trying to the
nerves than anything they had to endure in the clear light of day. It
was a never-to-be forgotten ordeal in the lives of the good folk of
Kimberley. From his high and dangerous perch on the conning tower the
bugler ever and anon blew his bugle, suggesting to the scared housemaid
the psychologi