That finished it.  What with the guns and the cheering, each Boer commando must have thought the next was pounded to mincemeat.  The rifle-fire dropped.

The devil had driven home all his tin-tacks, and for the rest of the day we had calm.

XIII.

A DIARY OF DULNESS.

     THE MYTHOPOEIC FACULTY—­A MISERABLE DAY—­THE VOICE OF THE
     POMPOM—­LEARNING THE BOER GAME—­THE END OF FIDDLING JIMMY—­MELINITE
     AT CLOSE QUARTERS—­A LAKE OF MUD.

Nov. 11.—­Ugh!  What a day!  Dull, cold, dank, and misty—­the spit of an 11th of November at home.  Not even a shell from Long Tom to liven it.  The High Street looks doubly dead; only a sodden orderly plashes up its spreading emptiness on a sodden horse.  The roads are like rice-pudding already, and the paths like treacle.  Ugh!  Outside the hotel drip the usual loafers with the usual fables.  Yesterday, I hear, the Leicesters enticed the enemy to parade across their front at 410 yards; each man emptied his magazine, and the smarter got in a round or two of independent firing besides.  Then they went out and counted the corpses—­230.  It is certainly true:  the narrator had it from a man who was drinking a whisky, while a private of the regiment, who was not there himself, but had it from a friend, told the barman.

The Helpmakaar road is as safe as Regent Street to-day:  a curtain of weeping cloud veils it from the haunting gunners on Bulwan.  Up in the schanzes the men huddle under waterproof sheets to escape the pitiless drizzle.  Only one sentry stands up in long black overcoat and grey woollen nightcap pulled down over his ears, and peers out towards Lombard’s Kop.  This position is safe enough with the bare green field of fire before it, and the sturdy, shell-hardened soldiers behind.

But Lord, O poor Tommy!  His waterproof sheet is spread out, mud-slimed, over the top of the wall of stone and earth and sandbag, and pegged down inside the schanz.  He crouches at the base of the wall, in a miry hole.  Nothing can keep out this film of water.  He sops and sneezes, runs at the eyes and nose, half manful, half miserable.  He is earning the shilling a-day.

At lunch-time they began to shell us a bit, and it was almost a relief.  At anyrate it was something to see and listen to.  They were dead-off Mulberry Grove to-day, but they dotted a line of shells elegantly down the High Street.  The bag was unusually good—­a couple of mules and a cart, a tennis-lawn, and a water-tank.  Towards evening the voice of the pompom was heard in the land; but he bagged nothing—­never does.

Nov. 12.—­Sunday, and the few rifle-shots, but in the main the usual calm.  The sky is neither obscured by clouds nor streaked with shells.  I note that the Sunday population of Ladysmith, unlike that of the City of London, is double and treble that of week-days.