To-day, indeed, for the first time, we have had brought home to us the dangers and discomforts, if not the horrors, of what a bombardment may be in an unfortified town under the fire of modern artillery.  We cannot accuse the Boers of having deliberately thrown shells into the houses of peaceful inhabitants, or over buildings on which the Geneva Cross was flying.  These are, unfortunately, just in the line of “Long Tom’s” fire from Rietfontein Hill, and the shells may have been aimed at our naval battery, but, if so, they went very high, or their trajectory at that range would not have carried them half a mile beyond the mark.

[Illustration:  THE ROYAL HOTEL, LADYSMITH

Showing ruins of Mr. Pearse’s bedroom, wrecked by a shell from “Long
Tom,” Nov. 3, 1899]

Several fell near the hospital, others went 500 yards farther in the direction of Sir George White’s headquarters, and one came crashing into my bedroom at the Royal Hotel, not ten yards from where many officers were then lunching.  The hotel is a prominent building, that can be seen from “Long Tom’s” battery, and many people, giving Boer gunners credit for astonishing accuracy, suggested that the shot must have been aimed to strike where it did, in the hope of bagging Colonel Frank Rhodes and Doctor Jameson, whose ordinary hour for meals was known to every spy frequenting the place, and might easily have been communicated by them to the artillerist Mattey, who was recognised among a group drinking at the bar on Tuesday evening.  Of slight materials do the Ladysmith townsmen weave romances, but one can hardly be surprised, seeing how long they have lived in strained relations with neighbours whose Boer sympathies were well known.  But whether intended for the Royal Hotel or not, the shell came very near to causing several vacancies in the senior ranks of this force.  Passing through the ceiling and partition wall of a colleague’s bedroom, it burst in mine with such force that it blew out the whole end-wall, hurling bricks across a narrow court, all about the dining-room windows, which were smashed by the explosion; but of those sitting close inside only one was slightly scratched by broken glass.  Clouds of dust, mingled with fumes of powder, poured in through the open casement, so that those in farther corners were for some moments in much anxiety as to the fate of their friends.  When they found that no harm had been done there was an assumption of mirth all round, but nobody cared to stay much longer in that room.  At the moment of explosion I had risen from the table to resume work in my chamber, which presented to my astonished eyes anything but the characteristics of a quiet study then.  Papers scattered in every direction were buried with clothes and kit under a wreckage of building materials.  One fragment of iron shell had gone clean through a bag and all its contents to bury itself beneath the floor in earth.  Another had crushed my precious Kodak flat, and there was scarcely a thing exposed in the place that had not been torn by the blast of powder or cut by splinters.  The diminished population of Ladysmith began to gather about that spot when they found that no other shells fell there.  “What a lucky escape for you!” they all said, and I devoutly agreed with them.