But although we exhausted ourselves with questions, and many of us hoped against hope, the hours sped slowly by and no message came.  The Palace, enclosed in its pink walls, had slunk to sleep, or forgotten us—­or, perhaps, had even found that there could be no truce.  Then midnight came, and as we were preparing, half incredulously, to go to sleep, we truly knew.  Crack, crack, went the first shots from some distant barricade, and bang went an answering rifle on our side.  Awakened by these echoes, the firing grew naturally and mechanically to the storm of sound we have become so accustomed to, and the short truce was forgotten.  It is no use; we must go through to the end....

VI

SHELLS AND SORTIES

3rd July, 1900.

* * * * *

For a week I have written nothing, absolutely nothing, and have not even taken a note, nor cared what happened to me or to anybody else.  How could I when I have been so crushed by unending sentry-go, by such an unending roar of rifles and crash of shells, that I merely mechanically wake at the appointed hour, mechanically perform my duty and as mechanically fall asleep again.  My ego has been crushed out of me, and I have become, doubtless, quite rightly so, an insignificant atom in a curious thing called a siege.  No mortal under such circumstances, no matter how faithful to an appointed task, can put pencil to paper, and attempt to sketch the confusion and smoke around him.  You may try, perhaps, as I have tried, and then, suddenly, before you can realise it, you fall half asleep and pencil and paper are thrice damned.

For we have been worked so hard, those of us who do not care and are young, and the enemy is pushing in so close and so persistently, that we have not much farther to run if the signs that I see about me go for anything.  Artillery, to the number of some eight or ten pieces, is now grinding our barricades to pieces and making our outworks more and more untenable.  Rifle bullets float overhead in such swarms that by a comparison of notes I now estimate that there must be from five to six thousand infantry and dismounted cavalry ranged against us.  Mines are being already run under so many parts of our advanced lines, and their dangers are so near that on the outworks we fall asleep ready to be blown up....

...  Nor are the dangers merely prospective.’  They are actual and grimly disgusting.  During the past week the casualty list has gone on rapidly increasing, and to-day our total is close on one hundred killed and wounded in less than two weeks’ intermittent fighting out of a force of four hundred and fifty rifles.  The shells occasionally fly low and take you on the head; the bullets flick through loopholes or as often take you in the back from some enfilading barricades, and thus through two agencies you can be hastened towards the Unknown.  As far as I