of the 'Daily Mail'
may in the enlightened year 2100 know what a siege and a bombardment
were like.

Sometimes I think the siege would be just as bad without the
bombardment.

In some ways it would be even worse; for the bombardment is something to
notice and talk of, albeit languidly. But the siege is an unredeemed
curse. Sieges are out of date. In the days of Troy, to be besieged or
besieger was the natural lot of man; to give ten years at a stretch to
it was all in a life's work; there was nothing else to do. In the days
when a great victory was gained one year, and a fast frigate arrived
with the news the next, a man still had leisure in his life for a year's
siege now and again.

But to the man of 1899--or, by'r Lady, inclining to 1900--with five
editions of the evening papers every day, a siege is a thousand-fold a
hardship. We make it a grievance nowadays if we are a day behind the
news--news that concerns us nothing.

And here are we with the enemy all round us, splashing melinite among us
in most hours of the day, and for the best part of a month we have not
even had any definite news about the men for whom we must wait to get
out of it. We wait and wonder, first expectant, presently apathetic, and
feel ourselves grow old.

Furthermore, we are in prison. We know now what Dartmoor feels like. The
practised vagabond tires in a fortnight of a European capital; of
Ladysmith he sickens in three hours.

Even when we could ride out ten or a dozen miles into the country, there
was little that was new, nothing that was interesting. Now we lie in the
bottom of the saucer, and stare up at the pitiless ring of hills that
bark death. Always the same stiff, naked ridges, flat-capped with our
intrenchments--always, always the same. As morning hardens to the brutal
clearness of South African mid-day, they march in on you till Bulwan
seems to tower over your very heads. There it is close over you, shady,
and of wide prospect; and if you try to go up you are a dead man.

Beyond is the world--war and love. Clery marching on Colenso, and all
that a man holds dear in a little island under the north star. But you
sit here to be idly shot at. You are of it, but not in it--clean out of
the world. To your world and to yourself you are every bit as good as
dead--except that dead men have no time to fill in.

I know now how a monk without a vocation feels. I know how a fly in a
beer-bottle feels.

I know how it tastes, too.