MAKING USE OF SAND STORMS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2402, 15 March 1900, Page 11

MAKING USE OF SAND STORMS.

Mr Wilkinson, the special war correspondent of the Sydney Daily Telegraph, writing from Modder River, says : —

Sand storms are very unpleasant thing* as a rule, but our energetic gunners and the Naval Brigade have found means of turningthem to account, and the enemy will soon learn to regard a distant cloud of dust with almost as much dread as they do the terrible lyddite shell. Our gunners in both redoubts have the range of all the Boer positions to a yard, so when they see a s^and storm coming from the we&t, the direction whence it invariably approaches, they proceed to lay their guns. As they put on the elevation by means of an instrument called the clinometer it is not necessary for them that the object at which they are firing should be visible. When the storm has swept up between them and the Boers they get to work, and pour a perfect hail of lyddite and shrapnel into the enemy's entrenchments. As the Boers can't see the flash of the guns, because the latter are obscured by the flying sand, or hear the reports, because the bhell travels faster than the sound of the explosion, the first intimation they receive of the fact that our gunners are at work is the dropping o£ our shells among them. Up to the time of writing they don't seem to have realised the connection between the sand storms and the furious bombardment with which they have lately been accompanied, but the Boer is a wary animal, and he is sure to make the discovery sooner or later.