camp holds that a mule must have strayed up against the barbed-wire strung along before their

trenches.

We had merely exchanged a round or two of civilities with our neighbours, and flattered ourselves that this would suffice for the day, for, as a rule, these things are left to us, and it is we who make the welkin ring. An hour or two later one hundred and fifty Reservists came to join the Yorkshire Light Infantry, and were paraded well forward on the veldt, to be seen and addressed by the Brigadier-General. They were spread along in a lengthy double line, and the Boers must have thought them threatening, for bang! came a solid shell into the veldt five hundred yards before them. It was comical then to note how the older men, experienced in this war, aired their experience before the new-comers.

"That's nothing," they said; "mustn't think anything of that. We have that every hour or two. You'll soon get used to it. We have it at night, too; but you mustn't get jumpy when the shells come rattling among the tents, because, really, there's no harm at all in them Boer shells."

In this way we alternately revelled in peace and in war-going out a few miles and destroying some

farmhouses which were proven nests of sniping Boers, or watching a Boer patrol which rode interestingly near one of our naval guns. Now it was at daybreak that we sent them our compliments, and next we were "boomed " out of bed and forced to dress twice in an hour at midnight, as we heard the roar of great guns and the crackle of artillery. On Christmas alone, of all the days since we took to the field, we enjoyed a full day of uninterrupted peace.

CHAPTER XXIV

SCENES AND SOUNDS OF MODERN WAR

THE

HE pictures of our battles which are produced in illustrated papers are not at all like real scenes at the front.

Art cannot keep pace with the quick advances of science, and illustrators find that for effect they must still put as much smoke and confusion in their battle studies as went with the old pictures of Waterloo. If this were left out the public would be disappointed, and unable to tell a battlefield from a parade.

Lately a picture in one of our leading papers, by a very capable artist, showed the British storming a Boer position. In the middle distance was a Boer battery, and the only gunner left alive was standing up with a bandage round his head, while smoke and flame and flying fragments of shells filled the air in his vicinity. In the rush of

the instant he must have been bandaged by the same shot that struck him, and as for the smoke and flying débris, there was more of this in a corner of that picture than was to be seen in all the four battles we have fought !

What then is a modern battle-how does it look and sound?

Really, the field of operations is so extensive, and the range of modern guns is so great, that fighting conditions have altered, until there is no longer any general "noise of battle hurtled in the air," no possibility of grasping or viewing an engagement from any single point.

You may hear one of our big guns loosed three miles over on the right, and another two miles on the left. If you are near they make a tremendous noise, yet I have not heard any explosion so loud as a good strong clap of thunder. The guns of the enemy cough far in front of you, and their shells burst within your lines with a louder sound-but with no real crash or deafening roar.

Our guns at their muzzles create but little smoke, though our lyddite shells throw up clouds of dust and smoke where they fall miles away. Because the Boers are using old-fashioned powder

in their cannon there is a small white cloud wherever one is fired, and a spurt of red sand where their shells dig into the veldt. The smoke of war, therefore, and the so-called roar of battle are now-a-days occasional, scattered, inconsiderable.

Rifle-firing has been the principal feature of our fights. It sounds like the frying of fat, or like the crackling and snapping of green wood in a bonfire. If you are within two miles of the front you are apt to be under fire, and then you hear the music of individual bullets. Their song is like the magnified note of a mosquito. "Z-z" they go over your head; z-zz-z-p" they finish as they bury themselves in the ground. This is a sound only to be heard when the bullets fly very close. You pick up your heels and run a hundred, or even fifty, yards, and you hear nothing but the general crackle of rifle-fire in and before the trenches.

The "putt-putt," or Vickers-Nordenfeldt gun, is able to interest you at a distance of three miles. Its explosions are best described by the nickname given to the gun by one regiment: "the blooming door-knocker." Its bullets or shells are as big as the bowl of a large briar-root pipe, and they tear and slit the air with a terrible sound, exploding