And here are we with the enemy all round us, splashing melinite among us in most hours of the day, and for the best part of a month we have not even had any definite news about the men for whom we must wait to get out of it.  We wait and wonder, first expectant, presently apathetic, and feel ourselves grow old.

Furthermore, we are in prison.  We know now what Dartmoor feels like.  The practised vagabond tires in a fortnight of a European capital; of Ladysmith he sickens in three hours.

Even when we could ride out ten or a dozen miles into the country, there was little that was new, nothing that was interesting.  Now we lie in the bottom of the saucer, and stare up at the pitiless ring of hills that bark death.  Always the same stiff, naked ridges, flat-capped with our intrenchments—­always, always the same.  As morning hardens to the brutal clearness of South African mid-day, they march in on you till Bulwan seems to tower over your very heads.  There it is close over you, shady, and of wide prospect; and if you try to go up you are a dead man.

Beyond is the world—­war and love.  Clery marching on Colenso, and all that a man holds dear in a little island under the north star.  But you sit here to be idly shot at.  You are of it, but not in it—­clean out of the world.  To your world and to yourself you are every bit as good as dead—­except that dead men have no time to fill in.

I know now how a monk without a vocation feels.  I know how a fly in a beer-bottle feels.

I know how it tastes, too.

And with it all there is the melinite and the shrapnel.  To be sure they give us the only pin-prick of interest to be had in Ladysmith.  It is something novel to live in this town turned inside out.

Where people should be, the long, long day from dawn to daylight shows only a dead blank.

Where business should be, the sleepy shop-blinds droop.  But where no business should be—­along the crumbling ruts that lead no whither—­clatters waggon after waggon, with curling whip-lashes and piles of bread and hay.

Where no people should be—­in the clefts at the river-bank, in bald patches of veldt ringed with rocks, in overgrown ditches—­all these you find alive with men and beasts.

The place that a month ago was only fit to pitch empty meat-tins into is now priceless stable-room; two squadrons of troop-horses pack flank to flank inside its shelter.  A scrub-entangled hole, which perhaps nobody save runaway Kaffirs ever set foot in before, is now the envied habitation of the balloon.  The most worthless rock-heap below a perpendicular slope is now the choicest of town lots.

The whole centre of gravity of Ladysmith is changed.  Its belly lies no longer in the multifarious emporia along the High Street, but in the earth-reddened, half-in visible tents that bashfully mark the commissariat stores.  Its brain is not the Town Hall, the best target in Ladysmith, but Headquarters under the stone-pocked hill.  The riddled Royal Hotel is its social centre no longer; it is to the trench-seamed Sailors’ Camp or the wind-swept shoulders of Caesar’s Camp that men go to hear and tell the news.