s force ought to be the best fighting men in
the world. We are learning lessons every day from the Boer. We are
getting to know his game, and learning to play it ourselves.

Our infantry are already nearly as patient and cunning as he; nothing
but being shot at will ever teach men the art of using cover, but they
get plenty of that nowadays.

Another lesson is the use of very, very thin firing-lines of good shots,
with the supports snugly concealed: the other day fourteen men of the
Manchesters repulsed 200 Boers. The gunners have momentarily thrown over
their first commandment and cheerfully split up batteries. They also lie
beneath the schanzes and let the enemy bombard the dumb guns if he
will--till the moment comes to fire; that moment you need never be
afraid that the R.A. will be anywhere but with the guns.

The enemy's shell and long-range rifle-fire dropped at half-past six.
The guns had breached a new epaulement on Thornhill's Kop--to the left
of Surprise Hill and a few hundred yards nearer--and perhaps knocked
over a Boer or two,--perhaps not. None of our people hurt, and a good
appetite for breakfast.

In the afternoon one of our guns on Caesar's Camp smashed a pompom.
Fiddling Jimmy has been waved away, it seems. The Manchesters are cosy
behind the best built schanzes in the environs of Ladysmith. Above the
wall they have a double course of sandbags--the lower placed endwise
across the stone, the upper lengthwise, which forms a series of
loopholes at the height of a man's shoulder.

The subaltern in command sits on the highest rock inside; the men sit
and lie about him, sleeping, smoking, reading, sewing, knitting. It
might almost be a Dorcas meeting.

I won the bet.

_Nov. 14._--The liveliest day's bombardment yet.

A party of officers who live in the main street were waiting for
breakfast. The new president, in the next room, was just swearing at the
servants for being late, when a shell came in at the foot of the outside
wall and burst under the breakfast-room. The whole place was dust and
thunder and the half-acrid, half-fat, all-sickly smell of melinite. Half
the floor was chips; one plank was hurled up and stuck in the ceiling.
All the crockery was smashed, and the clock thrown down; the pictures on
the wall continued to survey the scene through unbroken glasses.

Much the same thing happened later in the day to the smoking-room of the
Royal Hotel. It also was inhabited the minute before, wou