Another morning of unusual quiet.  People sicken of the monotony when shells are not flying.  We don’t know any reason for the calm, except that the Dutch are burying their dead of yesterday.  But the peace is welcome, and in riding round our positions I found nearly all the men lying asleep in the sun.  The wildest stories flew:  General French had been seen in the street; his brigade was almost in sight; Methuen was at Colenso with overwhelming force.  The townspeople took heart.  One man who had spent his days in a stinking culvert since the siege began now crept into the sun.  “They are arrant cowards, these Boers,” he cried, stamping the echoing ground; “why don’t they come on and fight us like men?” So the day wears.  At four o’clock comes an African thunderstorm with a deluge of rain, filling the water tanks and slaking the dust, grateful to all but the men of both armies uncovered on the rocks.

     November 11, 1899.

A soaking early morning with minute rain, hiding all the circle of the hills, for which reason there is no bombardment yet, and I have spent a quiet hour with Colonel Stoneman, arranging rations for my men and beasts, and taking a lesson how to organise supplies and yet keep an unruffled mind.  The rest of the morning I sat with a company of the 60th (K.R.R.) on the top of Cove Hill (another of the many Aldershot names).  The men had been lining the exposed edge of Observation Hill all night, without any shelter, whilst the thick cold rain fell upon them.  It was raining still, and they lay about among the rocks and thorny mimosa bushes in rather miserable condition.

It would be a good thing if the Army could be marched through Regent Street as the men look this morning.  It would teach people more about war than a hundred pictures of plumed horsemen and the dashing charge.  The smudgy khaki uniforms soaked through and through, stained black and green and dingy red with wet and earth and grass; the draggled great-coats, heavy with rain and thick with mud; the heavy sopping boots, the blackened, battered helmets; the blackened, battered faces below them, unwashed and unshaved since the siege began; the eyes heavy and bloodshot with sun and rain and want of sleep; the peculiar smell—­there is not much brass band and glory about us now.

At noon the mist lifted, and just before one the Boer guns opened fire nearly all round the horseshoe, except that the Manchesters were left in peace.  I think only one new gun had been placed in position, but another had been cleverly checked.  As a rule, it has been our polite way to let the Boers settle their guns comfortably in their places, and then to try in vain to blow them out.  Yesterday the enemy were fortifying a gun on Star Hill, when one of our artillery captains splashed a shell right into the new wall.  We could see the Boer gunners running out on both sides, and the fort has not been continued.