On Thursday, November 2nd, the last train escaped under a brisk fire, the passengers upon the wrong side of the seats.

At 2 P.M.on the same day the telegraph line was cut, and the lonely town settled herself somberly down to the task of holding off the exultant Boers until the day--supposed to be imminent--when the relieving army should appear from among the labyrinth of mountains which lay to the south of them.

Some there were who, knowing both the enemy and the mountains, felt a cold chill within their hearts as they asked themselves how an army was to come through, but the greater number, from General to private, trusted implicitly in the valour of their comrades and in the luck of the British Army.
One example of that historical luck was ever before their eyes in the shape of those invaluable naval guns which had arrived so dramatically at the very crisis of the fight, in time to check the monster on Pepworth Hill and to cover the retreat of the army.

But for them the besieged must have lain impotent under the muzzles of the huge Creusots.
But in spite of the naive claims put forward by the Boers to some special Providence--a process which a friendly German critic described as 'commandeering the Almighty'-- it is certain that in a very peculiar degree, in the early months of this war there came again and again a happy chance, or a merciful interposition, which saved the British from disaster.

Now in this first week of November, when every hill, north and south and east and west, flashed and smoked, and the great 96-pound shells groaned and screamed over the town, it was to the long thin 4.7's and to the hearty bearded men who worked them, that soldiers and townsfolk looked for help.