You know that gunners are looking for you through telescopes; that every spot is commanded by one big gun and most by a dozen.  You hear the squeal of the things all above, the crash and pop all about, and wonder when your turn will come.  Perhaps one falls quite near you, swooping irresistibly, as if the devil had kicked it.  You come to watch for shells—­to listen to the deafening rattle of the big guns, the shrilling whistle of the small, to guess at their pace and their direction.  You see now a house smashed in, a heap of chips and rubble; now you see a splinter kicking up a fountain of clinking stone-shivers; presently you meet a wounded man on a stretcher.  This is your dangerous time.  If you have nothing else to do, and especially if you listen and calculate, you are done:  you get shells on the brain, think and talk of nothing else, and finish by going into a hole in the ground before daylight, and hiring better men than yourself to bring you down your meals.  Whenever you put your head out of the hole you have a nose-breadth escape.  If a hundredth part of the providential deliverances told in Ladysmith were true, it was a miracle that anybody in the place was alive after the first quarter of an hour.  A day of this and you are a nerveless semi-corpse, twitching at a fly-buzz, a misery to yourself and a scorn to your neighbours.

If, on the other hand, you go about your ordinary business, confidence revives immediately.  You see what a prodigious weight of metal can be thrown into a small place and yet leave plenty of room for everybody else.  You realise that a shell which makes a great noise may yet be hundreds of yards away.  You learn to distinguish between a gun’s report and an overturned water-tank’s.  You perceive that the most awful noise of all is the throat-ripping cough of your own guns firing over your head at an enemy four miles away.  So you leave the matter to Allah, and by the middle of the morning do not even turn your head to see where the bang came from.

XII.

THE DEVIL’S TIN-TACKS.

     THE EXCITEMENT OF A RIFLE FUSILADE—­A SIX-HOURS’ FIGHT—­THE PICKING
     OFF OF OFFICERS—­A DISPLAY OF INFERNAL FIREWORKS—­“GOD BLESS THE
     PRINCE OF WALES.”

When all is said, there is nothing to stir the blood like rifle-fire.  Rifle-fire wins or loses decisive actions; rifle-fire sends the heart galloping.  At five in the morning of the 9th I turned on my mattress and heard guns; I got up.

Then I heard the bubble of distant musketry, and I hurried out.  It came from the north, and it was languidly echoed from Caesar’s Camp.  Tack-tap, tack-tap—­each shot echoed a little muffled from the hills.  Tack-tap, tack-tap, tack, tack, tack, tack, tap—­as if the devil was hammering nails into the hills.  Then a hurricane of tacking, running round all Ladysmith, running together into a scrunching roar.  From the hill above Mulberry Grove you can see every shell drop; but of this there was no sign—­only noise and furious heart-beats.