Forty-five minutes were allowed for lunch—­an interval which the Boers considered long enough for them—­and no doubt for us, too, since they might fairly assume that we did not get much to eat.  But on our side there was the trouble and delay involved in the getting of it.  To jostle about in a crowd for an indefinite period of time for sake of a scrap of flesh meat—­and such meat! such flesh!—­required rare ravenousness of appetite; and the bursting of a shell in the midst of a surging mass of humanity was so certain to be attended by fatal results that it was only the very healthy who bothered battling for so little.

The forty-five minutes were of brief duration, and the assault was promptly renewed when the clock struck two.  First came the boom; then the warning whistle; next the boom of a second gun almost before the bursting crash of the first shell had proclaimed its contact with terra firma.  It was not the numbers of the killed (because they were marvellously few) that awed the people so much as the possibilities of the situation.  The guns were fired at long range, and ten or fifteen seconds had to elapse ere anybody could be sure that his turn had not come.  Had a closer range been feasible the bombardment might have been more destructive, but the suspense would have been less trying.  The shells fell thickly the whole afternoon.  Never, hardly ever, was there a lull as the iron roofs of the houses continued to be fitted for service as rough observatories which enabled us to see balloons indeed.  Several mourners attending a funeral on its way to the cemetery narrowly escaped dismemberment, by a missile which dropped behind the hearse.  The Fire Brigade were alert and ready for contingencies; the brigade station at the Municipal compound was singled out for attack; and it looked as if the skill of the Boers in picking out and disabling the Officers in the field extended to the town, for the Chief of the firemen was struck while standing on his own doorstep.  He received a few ugly cuts, as also did two of his children.

And where all this time, it may be asked, where was Long Cecil?  Long Cecil had been doing its best, but with the odds so long as ten to one against, its best was a negligible quantity.  It sent shell after shell in one direction, then in another, but the enemy heeded it not at all; and though it may have irritated the Boer a little and done all that one gun of its calibre could do, it did not mitigate the perils of the populace.  That it had done its best was undeniable, but it sank in the public esteem for other reasons.  It was reputed to have killed two women in the Boer camp with its “compliments.”  I cannot vouch for the truth of the story, but it was seized upon to intensify the growing aversion to the whilom bepraised product of Colonial enterprise.  The report converted hostile head-shakes into voluble “I told you so’s,” and swelled the feeble chorus that had prophesied ill of Long Cecil from the beginning.