The sand-bag breast-works we had made in the morning were now vastly improved, and were much more substantial, because the men, when not firing, had dug away the earth behind them and strengthened them in front with the earth thrown out. Each man, in fact, had vied with his neighbour in digging himself farther into the ground, so that actually there was now a trench behind the breast-works. The rain, too, had soaked into the bags and made them more heavy and bullet-proof. Captain Williams’s Log Redoubt ran right across the side facing Bush Hill, and was so high that it kept off a great many of the bullets from there, and made it almost safe to walk about the top of the hill, if you only stooped down. The Maxim redoubt, too, at the harbour end of this breast-work, was quite strong and nearly four feet high, and Mr. Collins and his men added to it whenever firing was slack. The town itself was hidden from us by the line of smoke from the smouldering bushes about fifty yards down the slope of the hill. Hardly a shot came from that direction. None either came towards Sergeant Haig’s redoubt or from the sea at our rear. It was nearly mid-day, and the field-guns were still shelling us, but I think that the noise of their shells was the worst part of them so long as we kept under cover. Although several had burst right in the centre of the plateau during the last hour, nobody had been touched during that time. These were all common shell,[#] for they appeared to have run short of shrapnel, or found that they could not rely on the fuses bursting properly. [#] Thin-walled shell with a large bursting charge. Shrapnel shell have a small bursting charge and scatter round bullets when they burst. The men had become so used to these shells, that if one burst they hardly turned to look at it. Sometimes you would see a man screw himself down more firmly into the ground; but most of them took no notice at all, and joked amongst themselves or jeered at the unfortunate signalman, or one of the Maxims’ crews, who happened to be in the open and had to throw himself on the ground to escape the flying splinters. The Commander did once try to reach those guns with a Maxim, but the range must have been well over two thousand yards. We could not see where the bullets were going, and certainly they had no effect on the people working them. Once or twice, though, when the firing from the bushes became brisk, we soon made them ease down by letting off fifty or sixty rounds into Bush Hill, and Collins kept both the crews very much on the alert, with belts of cartridges ready to pump out bullets in case the enemy tried to make another rush. We had a fair amount of ammunition left, a fair amount of water, and plenty of provisions, and so, all things considered, we were pretty comfortable. The rain too had ceased, the wind also began to lose force, and every now and again the sun came out, though not for long enough to dry our dripping clothes.