November 26, 1899.

I was going to give you another dose of the dull diary.  But I haven’t the heart.  It would weary you, and I cannot say how horribly it would weary me.

I am sick of it.  Everybody is sick of it.  They said the force which would open the line and set us going against the enemy would begin to land at Durban on the 11th, and get into touch with us by the 16th.  Now it is the 26th; the force, they tell us, has landed, and is somewhere on the line between Maritzburg and Estcourt; but of advance not a sign.

Buller, they tell us one day, is at Bloemfontein; next day he is coming round to Durban; the next he is a prisoner in Pretoria.

The only thing certain is that, whatever is happening, we are out of it.  We know nothing of the outside; and of the inside there is nothing to know.

Weary, stale, flat, unprofitable, the whole thing.  At first, to be besieged and bombarded was a thrill; then it was a joke; now it is nothing but a weary, weary, weary bore.  We do nothing but eat and drink and sleep—­just exist dismally.  We have forgotten when the siege began; and now we are beginning not to care when it ends.

For my part, I feel it will never end.

It will go on just as now, languid fighting, languid cessation, for ever and ever.  We shall drop off one by one, and listlessly die of old age.

And in the year 2099 the New Zealander antiquarian, digging among the buried cities of Natal, will come upon the forgotten town of Ladysmith.  And he will find a handful of Rip Van Winkle Boers with white beards down to their knees, behind quaint, antique guns shelling a cactus-grown ruin.  Inside, sheltering in holes, he will find a few decrepit creatures, very, very old, the children born during the bombardment.  He will take these links with the past home to New Zealand.  But they will be afraid at the silence and security of peace.  Having never known anything but bombardment, they will die of terror without it.

So be it.  I shall not be there to see.  But I shall wrap these lines up in a Red Cross flag and bury them among the ruins of Mulberry Grove, that, after the excavations, the unnumbered readers of the ‘Daily Mail’ may in the enlightened year 2100 know what a siege and a bombardment were like.

Sometimes I think the siege would be just as bad without the bombardment.

In some ways it would be even worse; for the bombardment is something to notice and talk of, albeit languidly.  But the siege is an unredeemed curse.  Sieges are out of date.  In the days of Troy, to be besieged or besieger was the natural lot of man; to give ten years at a stretch to it was all in a life’s work; there was nothing else to do.  In the days when a great victory was gained one year, and a fast frigate arrived with the news the next, a man still had leisure in his life for a year’s siege now and again.

But to the man of 1899—­or, by’r Lady, inclining to 1900—­with five editions of the evening papers every day, a siege is a thousand-fold a hardship.  We make it a grievance nowadays if we are a day behind the news—­news that concerns us nothing.