Long Tom chipped a corner off the church yesterday; to-day the archdeacon preached a sermon pointing out that we are the heaven-appointed instrument to scourge the Boers.  Very sound, but perhaps a thought premature.

Nov. 13.—­Laid three sovs. to one with the ‘Graphic’ yesterday against to-day being the most eventful of the siege.  He dragged me out of bed in aching cold at four, to see the events.

At daybreak Observation Hill and King’s Post were being shelled and shelling back.  Half battalions of the 1st, 60th, and Rifle Brigade take day and day about on Observation Hill and King’s Post, which is the continuation of Cove Redoubts.  To-day the 60th were on Leicester Post.  When shells came over them they merely laughed.  One ring shell burst, fizzing inside a schanz, with a steamy curly tail, and splinters that wailed a quarter of a mile on to the road below us; the men only raced to pick up the pieces.

When this siege is over this force ought to be the best fighting men in the world.  We are learning lessons every day from the Boer.  We are getting to know his game, and learning to play it ourselves.

Our infantry are already nearly as patient and cunning as he; nothing but being shot at will ever teach men the art of using cover, but they get plenty of that nowadays.

Another lesson is the use of very, very thin firing-lines of good shots, with the supports snugly concealed:  the other day fourteen men of the Manchesters repulsed 200 Boers.  The gunners have momentarily thrown over their first commandment and cheerfully split up batteries.  They also lie beneath the schanzes and let the enemy bombard the dumb guns if he will—­till the moment comes to fire; that moment you need never be afraid that the R.A. will be anywhere but with the guns.

The enemy’s shell and long-range rifle-fire dropped at half-past six.  The guns had breached a new epaulement on Thornhill’s Kop—­to the left of Surprise Hill and a few hundred yards nearer—­and perhaps knocked over a Boer or two,—­perhaps not.  None of our people hurt, and a good appetite for breakfast.

In the afternoon one of our guns on Caesar’s Camp smashed a pompom.  Fiddling Jimmy has been waved away, it seems.  The Manchesters are cosy behind the best built schanzes in the environs of Ladysmith.  Above the wall they have a double course of sandbags—­the lower placed endwise across the stone, the upper lengthwise, which forms a series of loopholes at the height of a man’s shoulder.

The subaltern in command sits on the highest rock inside; the men sit and lie about him, sleeping, smoking, reading, sewing, knitting.  It might almost be a Dorcas meeting.

I won the bet.

Nov. 14.—­The liveliest day’s bombardment yet.

A party of officers who live in the main street were waiting for breakfast.  The new president, in the next room, was just swearing at the servants for being late, when a shell came in at the foot of the outside wall and burst under the breakfast-room.  The whole place was dust and thunder and the half-acrid, half-fat, all-sickly smell of melinite.  Half the floor was chips; one plank was hurled up and stuck in the ceiling.  All the crockery was smashed, and the clock thrown down; the pictures on the wall continued to survey the scene through unbroken glasses.