spent most of the day on Waggon Hill west of the town, where the 1st K.R.  Rifles have three companies and a strong sangar, very close to the enemy.  I found that, as became Britons, their chief interest lay in sport.  They had shot two little antelopes or rehbuck, and hung them up to be ready for a feast.  Their one thought was to shoot more.  From the hill I looked down upon one of Bester’s farms.  The owner-a Boer traitor-was now in safe keeping.  A few days ago his family drove off in a waggon for the Free State.  White were their parasols and in front they waved a Red Cross flag.  On a gooseberry bush in the midst of the farm they also left a white flag, where it still flew to protect a few fat pigs, turkeys, and other fowl.  The white flag is becoming a kind of fetish.  To-day all our white tents were smeared with reddish mud to make them less visible.  Beyond Range Post the enemy set up a new gun commanding the Maritzburg road as it crossed that point of hill.  The Irish Fusiliers who held that position were shelled heavily, but without loss.

     November 23, 1899.

The schoolmaster’s wife had a fine escape.  She was asleep in her bedroom when a 45lb. shell came through the fireplace and burst towards the bed.  The room was smashed to pieces, but she was only cut about the head, one splinter driving in the bone, but not making a very serious wound.  Two days before she had given a soldier 10s. for a fragment.  Now she had a whole shell for nothing.  At five o’clock “Long Tom” threw seven of his 96lb. shells straight down the street in quick succession, smashing a few shops and killing some mules and cattle, but without further harm.  We watched them from the top of the road.  They came shrieking over our heads, and then a flare of fire and a cloud of dust and stones showed where they fell.  At every explosion the women and children laughed and cheered with delight, as at the Crystal Palace fireworks.

Both yesterday and to-day the Boers on Bulwan spent much time and money shelling a new battery which Colonel Knox has had made beside the river near the racecourse.  It is just in the middle of the flat, and the enemy can see its six embrasures and the six guns projecting from them.  The queer thing is that these guns never reply, and under the hottest fire their gunners neither die nor surrender.  A better battery was never built of canvas and stick on the stage of Drury.  It has cost the simple-hearted Boers something like L300 in wasted shell.

All day waggons were reported coming down from the Free State and moving south.  They were said to carry the wives and daughters of the Free Staters driven by Buller from their own country and content to settle in ours, now that they had conquered it.  A queer situation, unparalleled in war, as far as I know.