[Illustration:  EFFECT OF A 96LB.  SHELL ON A PRIVATE HOUSE]

At night the British flashlight from Colenso was throwing signals upon the cloudy sky, and it was amusing to watch the Boers trying to confuse the signals by flashing their two searchlights upon the same cloud.  They have one light west of us near Bester’s Station, and to-night they showed a very brilliant electric light on the top of Bulwan.  When our signalling stopped, they turned it on the town, and very courteously lighted me home.  It was like the clearest moonlight, the shadows long and black, but all else distinct in colourless brilliance.  The top of Bulwan is four miles from our main street.  To make up for yesterday the shells were particularly lively to-day.  Before breakfast one fell on the railway behind our house, one into the verandah next door, and two into our little garden.  Unhappily, the last killed one of our few remaining fowls—­shivered it into air so that nothing but a little cloud of feathers was seen again.  In the middle of the afternoon old “Puffing Billy” again opened fire with energy.  I was at the tailor’s on the main street, and the shells were falling just round his shop.  “Thirty-eight, thirty-four,” said the little Scot measuring.  “There’s the Dutch church gone.  Forty-two, sixteen.  There’s the bank.  Just hold the tape, mon, while I go and look.  Oh, it’s only the Town Hall!” Among other shells one came in painted with the Free State colours, and engraved “With the compliments of the season.”  It is the second thus adorned, but whereas the first had been empty, this was charged with plum-pudding.  Can it be a Dutchman who has such a pleasant wit?  The condition of the horses becomes daily more pitiful.  Some fall in the street and cannot get up again for weakness.  Most have given up speed.  The 5th Lancers have orders never to move quicker than a walk.  The horses are just kept alive by grass which Hindoos grub up by the roots.  A small ration of ground mealies and bran is also issued.  Heavy rain came on and fell all night, during which we heard two far-off explosions.

     December 30, 1899.

Going up to Leicester Post in the early morning, I found the K.R.  Rifles drying themselves in the African sun, which blazed in gleams between the clouds.  Without the sun we should fare badly.  As it is, the rain, exposure, and bad food are reducing our numbers fast.  Passing the 11th Field Hospital on my way up, I saw stretcher after stretcher moving slowly along with the sick in their blankets.  “Dysentery, enteric; enteric, dysentery,” were the invariable answers.  All the thousands of shells thrown at us in the last two months count for nothing beside the sickness.

On the top of the hill I found the two guns of Major Wing’s battery trained on Surprise Hill as usual.  In accordance with my customary good fortune all the enemy’s guns opened fire at once.  But only the howitzer, the automatic, and the Bluebank were actually aimed our way.  The Bluebank was most effective.