In the afternoon I rode out to Waggon Hill, south-west of our position, to call upon the two howitzers. They are heavy squat guns about twenty years old, their shells being marked 1880, though they are said in reality to date from 1869. They were brought up from Port Elizabeth where the Volunteers used them, and certainly they have done fine service here. Concealed in the hollow of a hill, they are invisible to the enemy, and after many trials have now exactly got the range of the great 6 in. gun on Middle Hill. At any moment they can plump their shells right into his sangar, and the Boer gunners are frightened to work there. In fact, they have as effectually silenced that gun as if they had smashed it to pieces. They are worked by the Royal Artillery, two dismounted squadrons of the I.L.H. acting as escort or support. Them I found on picket at the extreme end of the hill. They told me they had seen large numbers of Boers moving slowly with cattle and waggons towards the Free State passes. The Boers whom I saw were going in just the opposite direction, towards Colenso. I counted twenty-seven waggons with a large escort creeping steadily to the south along some invisible road. They were carrying provisions or the ammunition to fight our relieving column. We hear to-day there will be no attempt to relieve us till the 15th, if then. A Natal newspaper, with extracts from the Transvaal _Standard and Diggers' News_, brought in yesterday, exaggerates our situation almost as much as the Boers themselves. If all Englishmen now besieged were asked why most they desired relief, there is hardly one would not reply, "For the English mail!" CHAPTER XII THE NIGHT SURPRISE ON GUN HILL _December 5, 1899._ We have now been shut up nearly five weeks. Some 15,000 people or more have been living on a patch of ground roughly measuring three miles each way. On that patch of ground at the lowest estimate 3,500 cases of explosive iron have been hurled at high velocity, not counting an incalculable number of the best rifle bullets. One can conceive the effect on a Londoner's mind if a shell burst in the city. If another burst next day, the 'buses would begin to empty. If a hundred a day burst for five weeks, people would begin to talk of the paralysis of commerce. Yet who knows? The loss of life would probably be small. The citizen might grow as indifferent to shells as he is to shooting stars. Here, for instance, the killed do not yet amount to thirty, the wounded may roughly be put down at 170, of whom, perhaps, twenty have died, and all except the confirmed cave-dwellers are beginning to go about as usual, or run for cover only when it shells particularly hard.