intermissions all day, and even in the evening, though parts of the Boer position had been captured and many of them had fled, there were some who still made good their defence, holding out in places of vantage with the greatest obstinacy.  These took advantage of the night to escape, and it was not till next morning that we had the place in our possession.  The Boers themselves, as we are told by people here, thought the position impregnable.  Certainly it was very strong.  The river has cut a channel or groove thirty feet deep in the ground; the edges, sharp and distinct, so that men can lie on the slant and look out across the plain.  A big loop in the river is subtended by a line of trenches and rifle-pits hastily dug (they only decided twenty-four hours before the attack to defend the position; this by Cronje’s advice, who had just come south from Mafeking, the others were for retiring to the next range of hills), from which the whole advance of our infantry across the level is commanded.  “We,” as the soldiers explained to me, “could see nothing in our front but a lot of little heads popping up to fire and then popping down again.”  These shelters, a long line of them, are littered thick with empty cartridge cases, hundreds in each; one thinks involuntarily of grouse-driving.  Bodies, still unburied, lay about when I was there.  Such odours! such sights!  The unimaginable things that the force of shot and shell can do to poor, soft, human flesh.  I saw soldiers who had helped to do the work turn from those trenches shaking.

LETTER V

THE FOUR POINT SEVEN

MODDER RIVER CAMP,

December 1899.

A few days ago we welcomed a distinguished stranger here in the shape of a long 4.7 naval gun.  They set him up in the road just outside the station, with his flat-hatted sailors in zealous attendance, where he held a day-long levee.  The gun is a remarkable object among the rest of our artillery.  Its barrel, immensely long but very slender, has a well-bred, aristocratic look compared with the thick noses of our field-guns.  It drives its forty-five pound shell about seven miles, and shoots, I am told, with perfect accuracy.  It is an enlarged edition of the beautiful little twelve-pounders which we have hitherto been using, and which exceed the range of our fifteen-pounder field-guns by about a half.  Why should naval guns be so vastly superior to land ones?

I interviewed the sailors on the accomplishments of the new-comer, and on the effects especially of lyddite, about which we hear so much.  One must allow for a little friendly exaggeration, but if the mixture of truth is in any decent proportion, I should say that spades to bury dead Boers with are all the weapons that the rest of us will require in future.  The gun uses shrapnel as well, but relies for its main effects on lyddite.  As for this horrible contrivance,