civil and military, so as to stretch it to its utmost.  With rain overhead and mud underfoot, chafing at their own idleness and humiliated by their own position, the soldiers waited through the weary weeks for the relief which never came.  On some days there was more shell-fire, on some less; on some there was sniping, on some none; on some they sent a little feeler of cavalry and guns out of the town, on most they lay still—­such were the ups and downs of life in Ladysmith.  The inevitable siege paper, ‘The Ladysmith Lyre,’ appeared, and did something to relieve the monotony by the exasperation of its jokes.  Night, morning, and noon the shells rained upon the town until the most timid learned fatalism if not bravery.  The crash of the percussion, and the strange musical tang of the shrapnel sounded ever in their ears.  With their glasses the garrison could see the gay frocks and parasols of the Boer ladies who had come down by train to see the torture of the doomed town.

The Boers were sufficiently numerous, aided by their strong positions and excellent artillery, to mask the Ladysmith force and to sweep on at once to the conquest of Natal.  Had they done so it is hard to see what could have prevented them from riding their horses down to salt water.  A few odds and ends, half battalions and local volunteers, stood between them and Durban.  But here, as on the Orange River, a singular paralysis seems to have struck them.  When the road lay clear before them the first transports of the army corps were hardly past St. Vincent, but before they had made up their mind to take that road the harbour of Durban was packed with our shipping and ten thousand men had thrown themselves across their path.

For a moment we may leave the fortunes of Ladysmith to follow this southerly movement of the Boers.  Within two days of the investment of the town they had swung round their left flank and attacked Colenso, twelve miles south, shelling the Durban Light Infantry out of their post with a long-range fire.  The British fell back twenty-seven miles and concentrated at Estcourt, leaving the all-important Colenso railway-bridge in the hands of the enemy.  From this onwards they held the north of the Tugela, and many a widow wore crepe before we got our grip upon it once more.  Never was there a more critical week in the war, but having got Colenso the Boers did little more.  They formally annexed the whole of Northern Natal to the Orange Free State—­a dangerous precedent when the tables should be turned.  With amazing assurance the burghers pegged out farms for themselves and sent for their people to occupy these newly won estates.