The Boers have many estimable qualities.  They are one of the few admirable races still surviving, and they conduct this siege with real consideration and gentlemanly feeling.  They observe the Sabbath.  They give us quiet nights.  After a violent bombardment they generally give us at least one day to calm down.  Their hours for slaughter are six to six, and they seldom overstep them.  They knock off for meals—­unfashionably early, it is true, but it would be petty to complain.  Like good employers, they seldom expose our lives to danger for more than eight hours a day.  They are a little capricious, perhaps, in the use of the white flag.  At the beginning of the siege our “Lady Anne” killed or wounded some of “Long Tom’s” gunners and damaged the gun.  Whereupon the Boers hoisted the white flag over him till the place was cleared and he was put to rights again.  Then they drew it down and went on firing.  It was the sort of thing schoolboys might do.  Captain Lambton complained that by the laws of war the gun was permanently out of action.  But “Long Tom” goes on as before.

I think the best story of the siege comes from a Kaffir who walked in a few days ago.  In the Boer camp behind Pepworth Hill he had seen the men being taught bayonet exercise with our Lee-Metfords, captured at Dundee.  The Boer has no bayonet or steel of his own, and for an assault on the town he will need it.  Instruction was being given by a prisoner—­a sergeant of the Royal Irish Fusiliers—­with a rope round his neck!

     November 13, 1899.

The Boer method of siege is quite inexplicable.  Perhaps it comes of inexperience.  Perhaps they have been studying the sieges of ancient history and think they are doing quite the proper thing in sitting down round a garrison, putting in a few shells and waiting.  But they forget that, though the sieges of ancient history lasted ten years, nowadays we really can’t afford the time.  The Boers, we hope, have scarcely ten days, yet they loiter along as though eternity was theirs.

To-day they began soon after five with the usual cannonade from “Long Tom,” “Puffing Billy,” and three or four smaller guns, commanding the Naval batteries.  The answers of our “Lady Anne” and “Bloody Mary” shook me awake, and, seated on the hill, I watched the big guns pounding at each other for about three hours, when there came an interval for breakfast.  As far as I could make out, neither side did the other the least harm.  It was simply an unlucrative exchange of so much broken iron between two sensible and prudent nations.  The moment “Tom” or “Billy” flashed, “Anne” or “Mary” flashed too.  Our shells do the distance about two and a-half seconds quicker than theirs, so that we can see the result of our shot just before one has to duck behind the stones for the crash and whiz of the enormous shells which started first.  To-day most of “Tom’s” shells passed over the batteries, and plunged down the hill into the town beyond.  It is supposed that he must be wearing out.  He has been firing here pretty steadily for over a fortnight, to say nothing of his work at Dundee.  But I think his fire upon the town is quite deliberate.  He might pound away at “Lady Anne” for ever, but there is always a chance that 96lbs. of iron exploding in a town may, at all events, kill a mule.