The age-herald., 1900-06-17

The letter Is written to MT. F. ]. Kleijh- naus, minister of mines in retoria:
 We are told by those who called them selves our friends how unwise 1t would be
 for us to attempt to measure our strength against that of England and were informed
 that the rocks behind which in other wars
 We had taken shelter would not serve us in
 this case, for the agencies which were to
 be employed would shower down upon us a
 helish rain of devastating material which
 would scatter our rocky shelters like chaff
 before the wind. For hundreds of square
 yards around the spot where one of these
 death-dealing instruments fell nothing was
 to escape with life the terrible lyddite was
 to perform with a certainty such as had
 never before been known its murderous
 work. And all these terrors which had
 been so assduously preparing for us for
 years past, have. after all, not proved as terrible as we were led to epect
 "Our surprise on being asked by the prisoners whom we had captured from the English. What effect had the lyddite shells when they burst% cannot be described in words We had found dum-dum bullets on
 the battlefield, but that lyddite had been used we had never dreamed. On more careful investigation we found, however, that there was something strange in con- nection with the greenish-yellow column of smoke which arose wherever the bombs
 
 there is death in that smoke, poison there i must be, or otherwise it were impossible 1 for death to be spread for a space of 400 yards around. And such destruction must take place, because the English themselves had said so.'
 We have been convinced. It was lyd- dte. It so happened that we had an op- portunity of seeing for ourselves the effect of lyddite and that were able to form
 some conception of the consequences of
 inhaling the deadly fumes. We were standing close to one of our Long TomS which was attracting the fire of the enemy as the magnet attracts steel; it rained | heavy and fast around Us from the enc mys guns, when the ships cannon landed a shell cloose to us. It made a tremen-
 dous noise as 1t struck the ground some distance behind our gun, sank about four feet in the yielding soil and, coming upon
 rock, burst with a most unearthly noise, similar to that which is caused by violent ly hammering iron building with heavy hammer. It made a hole in the ground big enough to bury horse in.
 Tt so happened that one of our men
 was at the time not more than ten paces from the spot where the shell exploded, and loud were our expressions of sympathy with
 the poor man whom should never sec
 again. the first victim of a lyddite bomb
 The fatal smoke cloud rose high in the
 air, and the fragments of the shell hurled
 through space, with a snarling sound, in
 all directions. Our man stood up walked
 to the hole which had been made by the shell. and stood calmly gazing down into it. As already said we found certain DOT tions of these bombs, containing not only
 lyddite, but also the chemical matter re- quired in order to explode it, and I send
 herewith a portion in order that it may be
 analysed. The lyddite itself may be seen
 in the possession of Dr. Cunning in the State Museum.
 "The enemy uses lyddte in connection with two guns of 12.5 centimeters, and these
 are we are informed, ships guns served
 by the sailors, and are situated in the hills to the north of the town, and fire two kinds of shells.
 With respect to the actual workings of the bonds. may inform you that the ma terial in the bag marked X appears to be ignited immedia tely upon the projectile coming into contact with any hard sub
 stance, and this immediately sets fire to the lyddite, which eXplodes with the effect above described. The English say that lyddite has six times the explosive power of dynamite, but, at the same time it is quiescent, and will not, like dynamite, ex- pode merely upon impact, and it cannot, therefore, be fired with ordinary powder and when it falls it bursts into fragments, which scatter every side When the lyddite was eXperimented with in Pretoria
 the same results were obtained, and we came to the conclusion that the projectles
 were about as harmless those of the
 early part of the eighteenth century"