nct,
so that men can lie on the slant and look out across the plain. A big
loop in the river is subtended by a line of trenches and rifle-pits
hastily dug (they only decided twenty-four hours before the attack to
defend the position; this by Cronje's advice, who had just come south
from Mafeking, the others were for retiring to the next range of hills),
from which the whole advance of our infantry across the level is
commanded. "We," as the soldiers explained to me, "could see nothing in
our front but a lot of little heads popping up to fire and then popping
down again." These shelters, a long line of them, are littered thick
with empty cartridge cases, hundreds in each; one thinks involuntarily
of grouse-driving. Bodies, still unburied, lay about when I was there.
Such odours! such sights! The unimaginable things that the force of shot
and shell can do to poor, soft, human flesh. I saw soldiers who had
helped to do the work turn from those trenches shaking.

LETTER V

THE FOUR POINT SEVEN

MODDER RIVER CAMP,

_December_ 1899.

A few days ago we welcomed a distinguished stranger here in the shape of
a long 4.7 naval gun. They set him up in the road just outside the
station, with his flat-hatted sailors in zealous attendance, where he
held a day-long levee. The gun is a remarkable object among the rest of
our artillery. Its barrel, immensely long but very slender, has a
well-bred, aristocratic look compared with the thick noses of our
field-guns. It drives its forty-five pound shell about seven miles, and
shoots, I am told, with perfect accuracy. It is an enlarged edition of
the beautiful little twelve-pounders which we have hitherto been using,
and which exceed the range of our fifteen-pounder field-guns by about a
half. Why should naval guns be so vastly superior to land ones?

I interviewed the sailors on the accomplishments of the new-comer, and
on the effects especially of lyddite, about which we hear so much. One
must allow for a little friendly exaggeration, but if the mixture of
truth is in any decent proportion, I should say that spades to bury dead
Boers with are all the weapons that the rest of us will require in
future. The gun uses shrapnel as well, but relies for its main effects
on lyddite. As for this horrible contrivance, all I can say is that the
Geneva Conference ought to interdict it. The effects of the explosion of
a lyddite shell are as follows:--Any one within 50 yards is obliterated