of Ladysmith their utter helplessness to prevent the isolation and investment of the town.  Any doubt that may have lingered among them or the civil inhabitants was dispelled by the action promptly taken by Sir George White to try and secure the safety of these latter and his sick and wounded.  The circumstances are related by Mr. Pearse in a letter dated 5th November:—­

Sunday, 5th November.—­There can be no doubt about the first effects of shell-fire on a beleaguered town.  Let men try to disguise the fact as they may, it gets on the nerves of the most courageous among us, producing a sense of helplessness in the presence of danger.  Nobody likes sitting still to be battered at without power of effective reply.  Still less would he be content to stand inactive by while the wounded and defenceless were being shelled.  These considerations no doubt influenced Sir George White yesterday when he sent a message to General Joubert asking that non-combatants with sick and wounded might be allowed to leave Ladysmith without molestation.  It must have been bitterly humiliating for a soldier in command of ten or twelve thousand British troops, who have been twice victorious in battle, to feel that one reverse had resulted in making him a suitor for so much favour at the hands of an adversary.  Whether the request ought ever to have been made or not, to say nothing of whether we ought to have been in the abject position of having to make it, is a question about which most civilians are at variance with the military authorities, seeing that the answer was a foregone conclusion.  Its exact purport we do not know yet, but it amounted to a flat refusal, as most of us had foreseen, and was accompanied by alternative proposals which placed Joubert in the position of a potential conqueror—­dictating terms, and our acceptance of these cannot be read by the Boers in any other light than as an admission of weakness or pusillanimity.  Of course we know that it means nothing of the kind, but simply that Sir George White would not expose sick and wounded, with helpless women, children, and non-combatants generally, to the possible horrors of a prolonged bombardment.  So long as they remained in town he would be righting with one hand tied, because he could not in that case place batteries in certain advantageous positions without the risk of drawing fire from Boer guns on Ladysmith and its civilian inhabitants.  Whether this state of things has been mended much by Sir George White’s acceptance of Boer conditions and Ladysmith’s practical repudiation of them may well be doubted.  As the matter is generally understood, General Joubert, while declining to grant Sir George’s request, consented that a neutral camp for sick, wounded, and non-combatants should be formed at Intombi Spruit, five miles out on the railway line to Colenso, and practically within the Boer lines.  They were to be supplied with food, water, and all necessaries from Ladysmith by train daily, under the white flag, and to be on parole not to take any part thenceforth in this war.