Our long-expected bombardment began on the next day (November 7th), and it was a feeble business. The Boers fixed a gun on a kopje about four miles out Spytfontein way, and commenced trying to shell us. They fired about twenty shells in all, and no damage whatever was done. A very few—only two or three—reached the town, and they fell in the street, and no injury whatever was done either to people or property. The gun was so far off that we could not hear much of a report when it went off, and the shells burst with an insignificant noise—that is, when they did burst at all, but the majority of them did not burst. The corruption of the Boer Government had recoiled on themselves, and whoever supplied the shells had supplied apparently a job lot of old stuff, and had no doubt charged full price, and a little over, for them. Report says that some of the shells which did not burst were filled with sawdust instead of powder, but I do not know whether this is really true or not. One shell fell in the same street as Ruffel's shop, where my office is, but about one hundred and fifty yards higher up. It is said to have exploded within a few yards of an Irish policeman, but all the notice he took of it was to remark, "Begob, fwhat will they be playin' at next?" For the truth of this, however, I will not be responsible either. Several of these shells fell not far from the house of a patient of mine, which is in a prominent position and easy to see from a distance; but the lady of the house sat quietly on the verandah without turning a hair, being rather amused than otherwise. She gave me a chunk of one of the shells as a memento.
Next day we were waked before six by three cannon shots which sounded very close, and after the shot we could hear the shell explode each time, so we thought that the Boers had got hold of a better lot of stuff, and really meant business this time, but it turned out afterwards that it was our own guns firing.
On the 9th Agnes started with influenza, and had to give up her refugee work at last. I was very busy, and could not look after her much myself, so I got a nurse to attend to her, and she got all right in a few days.
The 10th was a quiet day. No bombarding took place, but the armoured train was fired on by the Boers as it went to try and reconnoitre to the northward.
Next day (the 11th) we had a pretty hot time. The Boers had brought their guns nearer and to a different position, and began shelling at 5.15 a.m. They had got the range by this time, and almost every shell landed in the town. I had to go out early to a case, and went down into the main road opposite the end of the house, and stood talking there to a friend who had been watching the shells falling farther up the town. I was only out about a quarter of an hour, and had just got into the garden, when I heard the Boer cannon fire, and in a few seconds the unmistakable "whiz" of a shell, followed at once by its explosion, let me know that trouble was mighty near. I went out to see where it had burst, and found it was in the main road close by. One piece struck a Kaffir woman on the back of the head and knocked her brains out, and she fell on the pavement and died in a few minutes, not a hundred yards from our house in a straight line, in Dutoitspan Road, near the club. Another woman who was walking with her was not touched. Another piece of the shell cut a thickish branch off a tree exactly where I had stood talking to my friend a quarter of an hour before.
This was getting near with a vengeance, and I did not at all like it, as our house stood a good chance of getting hit, being two-storied, while all the others around it were only one story high. However, though they shelled away for two hours in the morning and two more in the afternoon, nobody else was touched, and no other shell came as near as this one.
After this the Boers kept their guns in the same position and fired at us in a half-hearted sort of way every day except Sunday for a whole week; we had shells in town on the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th. They generally began soon after daylight, and went on for an hour or two, till they got tired, or possibly till they knocked off for breakfast, and they usually treated us to an hour or two's performance in the afternoon again. During the seven days of active bombardment they fired at least seven hundred shells into the town, and the amount of damage done both to life and property was so small that it would hardly be believed.
The Boers fancy the Lord fights for them. If they knew how little they had hurt us with their shells, I think they would want a new ally, or else think that their old one was helping us.
Besides the Kaffir woman, no one was killed, but a Dutchwoman died of fright when a shell burst near her house. A Dutchman, too, was driving a fare in his cab when a shell dropped on his horses, killing one outright and breaking his own arm, but not damaging the fare in the least. Then one morning early I was rung up, and an unmistakable Hebrew voice yelled up my speaking tube: "Come down at once; a shell has went through my arm." I thought he probably hadn't much arm left after this, but found that it was only a splinter of the shell after all. He had been lying in bed, and a shell had dropped through the roof and burst in his room, a small piece of it going through the fleshy part of his arm, without touching the bone. Another man was said to have been grazed by a splinter on the same day, and this is the sum total of the personal damage done by all those shells.
On the other hand the narrow escapes were numerous, and some of them were simply miraculous. One day a shell came into the Queen's Hotel. It just missed the dining-room where quite thirty people were at lunch, and dropped into the pantry adjoining it. As luck would have it, there were no waiters in the pantry just then, but there were two cats, both of which were killed, and the crockery was a good deal smashed. I believe one man stayed to finish his lunch, but all the rest of the folk lost their appetites and cleared out.
On another day the shells were falling near the house of an old chap (a patient of mine), and he and his daughters went to the front door to look out and see what was happening.
A shell came through the end of the house, across one room, through the wall, across the passage, through another wall and into the bowels of a piano, which was standing up against the wall. There it burst, and a jolly old mess it made of that piano, too. It crossed the passage within eight feet of the people, and not one of them was even scratched, but the piano is only fit for the scrap heap. Another shell came through a roof into a room adjoining a bedroom where a patient of mine was lying ill, and exploded, but did not hurt the patient. I have a piece of this one to make a brooch for Agnes.
One shell fell in an office on to a chair where a man had been sitting writing not a minute before, but who had got up to get something he wanted from another room. Another fell in Dr. Mathias's front garden, just in front of a window, as he and two other men were having lunch just inside (this is the doctor who has the honour of being dear Maria's employer); nobody was hurt, but we hoped that Maria was scared. Another fell on the footpath in front of a tobacconist's shop in the main street, at a most frequented corner, and burst without even breaking the window. Another went through the English church. Another wrecked a small house where one of the club waiters lived, but as the house was in a rather hot corner for shells, he had removed his family and furniture only the day before.
All the time this shelling was going on it was rather nervous work seeing one's patients in the part of the town where the shells were falling. Most of them came from the same direction, and if you were on foot when a gun went off, you had plenty of time and knew just where to shelter; but driving about was different, as you did not hear the gun, the rattle of the cart deadening the sound.
One day I was coming across the Market Square when they were firing, and I suddenly saw a puff of smoke and a cloud of dust in the middle of the street, about one hundred yards in front of me, and there a shell had burst. As several had landed in the same neighbourhood, I turned up a side street, as it was not good enough to get my head caved in. Dr. Symonds had a very narrow escape, as a shell landed and burst within ten yards of his horses' heads.
Lots of shells fell in our forts, but we put up shellproof shelters in them, and not a man was touched. Eighteen fell into one little fort in one afternoon.
Our men got quite expert in dodging the shells. You heard the gun boom, and a few seconds after the "whiz" of the shell came, and you ducked close under a wall or earthbank or shelter of any sort that was handy, and then the shell burst; immediately every one in the neighbourhood tore frantically towards it to pick up the pieces, for which there was a ready sale, and good pieces, such as the bottom or the conical point with the brass fuse in it, would fetch from one to two pounds. It was really laughable to see the shell hunters on the look-out when the firing was hot, and tearing up to the place where the shells burst to collar the bits. In more than one instance lawsuits were threatened over the ownership of pieces of a shell.
Finding how little damage was done, we soon began to treat the bombardment with calm indifference, and the hottest day's shelling did not create a quarter the alarm that the hooters used to do. We became quite learned in shells, too, and talked glibly of shrapnel and ring shells, and time fuses and percussion fuses, and all the rest of it.
The one they were most liberal with, and which we got to know best, was the ring or segment shell. This was about seven inches high, three inches in diameter, and bluntly conical in shape. It consisted of a pile of rings like cogwheels, but with a large space in the centre, and the cogs only held together by very narrow bridges of iron. They are made of very brittle cast iron, and piled one on top of another to the required height, the top ones getting gradually smaller to give the necessary conical shape. Round this pile a thin coating of iron is cast, and then the incomplete shell is smoothed off in a lathe, leaving a smooth, thin coat of cast iron holding the cogs in position. The hollow in the centre of the cogwheels is then filled with gunpowder, and just before it is fired the fuse is screwed into the point. It is a brass tube about three inches long, and about as thick as an ordinary candle. Inside it is a percussion cap, with a spike so arranged that it fires the cap when the nose of the shell butts up against anything hard. There are two copper bands round the shell. The one near the base is corrugated when it reaches us, but this is due to the rifling in the cannon; the other one is quite plain. These bands fit themselves to the grooves in the gun, being soft metal, and do not damage it as the iron would do. The corrugated one is the one to make brooches out of.
When the shell bursts, the cogwheels are supposed to split up into the separate cogs, and these should, in theory, "spread death and destruction on all sides." As practised by the Boers, however, they seem to be a particularly harmless sort of firework. Our artillery officers tell us this is because the Boers are using their guns at the extreme range to which they will carry, and that if they used them at two-thirds the distance, we should be anything but amused by them. The powder inside the shell is only enough to burst the case, but not to hurl the fragments apart with any degree of force. If, however, the shell bursts whilst it has still a big velocity, the pieces go on with the same velocity, and are very dangerous.
Shrapnel is designed on this plan. The shell does not have to butt up against anything, but is arranged to burst in the middle of its flight, and instead of cogwheels it contains several hundred bullets which scatter, and really do manage the death-and-destruction business very satisfactorily. But these shells are very much heavier than the other kind, on account of the bullets, and so will only travel about half the distance that the others do; therefore, though a few were fired when our men were out near the Boers, I don't think any ever reached the town.
All this time you have probably been asking yourselves what our men were doing whilst this shelling performance was going on; and there is only one answer to this—viz., cursing the Government.
When first there was any rumour of trouble with the Transvaal, they persistently denied that anything of the kind was possible, and all through steadily refused to let guns or police, or ammunition or soldiers, come up to Kimberley. In fact, they hindered any defence preparations in every way they could. As a result, our regular soldiers are less than six hundred in number, and the best guns we have are seven-pounders—i.e., the weight of the shell they throw is seven pounds.
The Boers have all sorts of guns, even up to one hundred-pounders, though the largest they have used against Kimberley has been a twelve-pounder. The range of the gun increases with the weight of the projectile, and so the result was that the Boers could place their guns well out of the reach of ours, and pump shells into us with perfect safety. Our men were too few to sally out and take their guns, but whenever our guns managed to get within range of the Boers, their firing was splendid—far and away more accurate than those of the Boers —and the Boers did not like it at all. It we had had two fifteen-pounders, not a shell would have ever come into the town, and if we had had two thousand men instead of seven hundred, no siege would have ever taken place.
I think I have nearly told you everything of interest about the shelling. No there is one other matter. All the bombardment of the town came from the north-west, and the people who lived in that quarter were advised to come into the town out of reach of the shells. So they did, and a rough time they had. They took up their quarters in schools and halls and other available places, and were overcrowded and generally uncomfortable. After a week of it they decided that the comforts of their own homes, even with the risk of shells thrown in, were preferable, and so all of them, except a few of the most nervous, went back.
To be safe, they dug pits in their gardens or back yards, and roofed them with firewood or old iron, and put a couple of layers of bags full of earth on top, and then piled loose earth on the top of these, so that when any shelling began they could take shelter in the pit and be safe. Heaps of people had to turn out of their homes on account of the siege, as they lived outside the line of forts, and so were liable to be shot by our own people, as well as by the Dutch in case of attack, and also to be rushed and looted at any time, even when there was no big attack. All the Kenilworth people came into town quite early in the siege, and are still unable to go home. Then the natives who lived in two of the locations were turned out and sent to a place within the forts, as their huts were liable to give cover to an attacking force. As soon as they were cleared out, the huts were all flattened out and destroyed.
In several instances good houses were razed to the ground for the same reason, and in front of one commanding fort all the garden fences, etc., that ran crossway on were laid down, so that the Boers could not dodge behind them in case of attack. So on the whole our people took very thorough precautions when they really did start, but many people say that if the Transvaal had started business a week sooner than they did, they could have taken the town with the greatest of ease. I think a month sooner they would have done, but not a week.
All this has really brought me no further than November 11 th, the day on which the bombardment started. On that day our men (the mounted ones, for infantry are no use against mounted Boers) went out and had a brush with the enemy. One of ours was killed, and from subsequent native reports we think several Boers were slain. But our men were at a disadvantage, as they always were in these sorties, for all round the town the bush had been cleared and the Boers could see them coming, and take cover and wait till they got within range, and then blaze away. If they could have plucked up courage to attack the town, our men would have been under cover and the Boers in the open, but that is not the sort of game they care for. As one old Dutchwoman said to me, "The Dutch are very determined." "Very determined not to get hurt, I suppose you mean," was my answer.
None of us liked these sorties, as they exposed our men too much, but the Boers would not give us a chance to get at them, so we had to make a chance now and then to prevent them getting too cheeky.
Nothing else happened until the 14th, when there were rumours of an ultimatum from the Boer commandant to Colonel Kekewich, giving him twenty-four hours in which to surrender the town, or he would bombard it. At the time we hardly believed this, but later on it turned out to have been quite true, as in a Dutch paper which came off one of the prisoners whom our men took one day later on, there was the full text of the commandant's letter and Kekewich's reply. The latter was to the effect that if the commandant wanted Kimberley, he had better come and take it, and further, that as the Boers had been using the white flag for improper purposes, if any one came fooling around with a white flag in future, he would probably get hurt, as all the officers had orders to fire on all white flags now.
This was because the Boers, with their usual deceit, had been using the white flag to get into better cover, and to take other unfair advantage of us. In the first fight they sent a white flag out, and when one of our men went out to it to parley, the Dutchman asked how many men there were out on our side, were they police, or Volunteers, or Regulars, and many such impertinent questions. Naturally our man told him to go to the devil and find out, but the Dutch took advantage of the parley to take up a better position.
Again, when our ambulance waggons were out bringing in the wounded at any of the fights, I think I am correct in stating that the Boers invariably fired at them when they were within range, though each waggon carried a big red-cross flag. And these are the gentle and inoffensive people that Olive Schreiner prates about! Brutes! They are not even decent savages, but just a cross between a bushman and a baboon, only more ignorant than either of their parents.
On the 16th our men had another brush just out to the north-west, one of them being killed and eight wounded. I only got one of the wounded this time, as it was early in the morning, and the message to fetch me got muddled somehow, so I was a little late at the hospital. My man had four holes in him, all from one bullet. It went through the outer side of his left thigh and through his left hand too, which was resting on his thigh at the time, but only one of the small bones of his hand was broken, so he was soon all right again.
On the 17th I had rather a slack afternoon, so we got Dr. Stoney to show us over the forts (to which he was doctor) up at the waterworks reservoir. When we went out, the shells were dropping at the reservoir, so we got on to the veldt to one side of it, and looked on a long way off at a brush which was going on in another direction. Our men were out and trying to draw the Boers; but they, as usual, did not see it. Our seven-pounders were on a debris heap, and were firing over the heads of our men at the Boers, who were far away hidden in a watercourse.
The rifle firing was tremendous—almost entirely from the Boers, as we learnt later— and it sounded as if about ten waggon-loads of wounded would be the result, but it wasn't. Only one of our men was hit in the calf of the leg—not a serious wound. Whether any Dutch were potted, we did not know—in fact, that was a thing we never did know. The Dutch paper I spoke of just now gave full accounts of several of these skirmishes, and generally said: "Our loss was one man slightly wounded, but the English suffered tremendously." Then in an out-of-the-way corner you saw: "Franz de Beer, who was killed in the fight at Kimberley on such a date, was the son of so-and-so." This occurred more than once in the same paper. Certainly the Boers were smart in getting away their killed and wounded, but of course they were in their own lines, as they did not advance to meet us as a rule, but let us go to them, which is part of the usual Boer tactics, and they don't ask for anything better. They say, too, that the Boers remove their dead so rapidly by the primitive and crude method of putting a rope round them and yanking them off at a gallop behind a horse.
After watching the fight I have been speaking of, we went on to the reservoir, as the firing had ceased. We saw the guns and shells, and the officer in charge explained them to us. There has been more firing at the reservoir than at any other place, either because the Boers want to pot our guns and disable them or to burst the reservoir bank and let out the water. Lots of shells have plumped harmlessly into the water and some struck the bank, but nobody was hurt. The guns are intact, and the reservoir is as it was.
We don't think much of the Boers as artillerymen. I think I told you that my driver wanted me to buy a house for him some while back. The house he fancied—and which I should have bought, but for a disagreement as to price—is a little way from the reservoir and in the direct line of fire of the Boer guns. No less than three shells went through that house, and several others fell near it. Daniel is now rather pleased that I did not buy that house. I have the entire top, with fuse complete, of one of the shells that fell near it, and a similar one split in halves that fell in Kenilworth. I am going to have them fixed up as paper-weights when we get out of this.
