November 20, 1899.

“Gentlemen,” said Sir George White to his Staff, “we have two things to do—­to kill time and to kill Boers—­both equally difficult.”  The siege is becoming intolerably tedious.  It is three weeks to-day since “Black Monday,” when the great disaster befell us, and we seem no nearer the end than we were at first.  We console ourselves with the thought that we are but a pawn on a great chessboard.  We hope we are doing service by keeping the main Boer army here.  We hope we are not handed over for nothing to ennui enlivened by sudden death.  But the suspicion will recur that perhaps the army hedging us in is not large after all.  It is a bad look-out if, as Captain Lambton put it, we are being “stuck up by a man and a boy.”

Nothing is so difficult to estimate as Boer numbers, and we never take enough account of the enemy’s mobility.  They can concentrate rapidly at any given point and gain the appearance of numbers which they don’t possess.  However, the balloon reports the presence of laagers of ten commandoes in sight.  We may therefore assume about as many out of sight, and consider that we are probably doing our duty as a pawn.

This morning the Boers hardly gave a sign of life, except that just before noon “Puffing Billy” shelled a platelayer’s house on the flat beyond the racecourse, in the attempt to drive out our scouts who were making a defended position of it.

In the afternoon I rode up to the Rifle Brigade at King’s Post, above the old camp, and met Captain Paley, whom I last saw administering a province in Crete.  Suddenly the Boer guns began firing from Surprise Hill and Thornhill’s Kop, just north of us, and the shells passing over our heads, crashed right into the 18th Hussar camp beside a little bridge over the river below.  Surprise Hill alone dropped five shells in succession among the crowded tents, horses, and men.  The men began hurrying about like ants.  Tents were struck at once, horses saddled, everything possible taken up, and the whole regiment sought cover in a little defile close by.  Within half an hour of the first shell the place was deserted.  The same guns compelled the Naval Brigade to shift their position last night.  We have not much to teach the Boer gunners, except the superiority of our shells.

The bombardment then became general; only three Gordons were wounded, but the town suffered a good deal.  Three of “Long Tom’s” shells pitched in the main street, one close in front of a little girl, who escaped unhurt.  Another carried away the heavy stone porch of the Anglican Church, and, at dinner-time, “Silent Susan” made a mark on the hotel, but it was empty.  Just before midnight the guns began again.  I watched them flashing from Bulwan and the other hills, but could not mark what harm they did.  It was a still, hot night, with a large waning moon.  In the north-west the Boers were flashing an electric searchlight, apparently from a railway truck on the Harrismith line.  The nation of farmers is not much behind the age.  They will be sending up a balloon next.