74 
DISCUSSION ON ARTILLERY. 
portion was square, made of brick, about four feet thick, and the dome 
was I should say, two and a half feet thick. The large hole I estimated 
was about twenty feet high and twelve feet wide; of course that was 
made by several shells. The top of the tomb was also blown off for a 
distance (downwards) of about six feet, making a large hole in the 
apex; that was done by two shells. 
Then as regards the question of setting fire to buildings; I found 
two bursts of shell which had fallen short of the MahdTs tomb when 
we were shooting at it. One burst in lath and plaster and another in 
thatch; the thatch was yellow with the bursting shell but it was not 
burnt at all. 
The Chairman Were there no signs of fire ? 
Captain Buckle : —There were no signs of fire that I could see Sir; 
it was merely destroyed close to the burst. The wall, as Colonel Elmslie 
has said, was about six feet thick at the bottom and four and a half 
feet thick at the top and from twelve to twenty feet high. It was made 
of large rubble and stones which were fastened together, rather weakly 
I think, with some sort of mud, and was finished off very nicely out¬ 
side and looked strong; but was not nearly so strong as the wall they 
put up for us to practice at, at Abbassiyeh. As to the holes that 
were spoken of by Colonel Elmslie, there were two of them near 
one place we had been shooting at in the wall, each of them large 
enough to ride through, but it was merely a hole; the top of the wall 
was still standing above it. We made three breaches altogether in 
the wall, but we did not go on with two of them; one we found was 
no good; it only led into an enclosure; and at another one we could not 
see the effect of our shells well, so we abandoned it and went on to 
make a large one where there would have been quite room enough for 
a dozen men to go in abreast; it was rather a steep approach up the 
debris, but still it was a very practicable breach. Then we fired at the 
Beit-el-Mal and barracks, but the only effect to be noticed was, that 
the shells passed through the walls, which were about a foot thick, and 
burst on the other side; they did not burst on the wall but passed 
through and burst inside. So far as we could see, the man-killing 
effect had been very good. We fired at what we thought was a gun¬ 
powder factory but which turned out to be a workshop ; but not many 
rounds were fired at that. Only the front wall was breached and there 
was not much damage done inside because we did not go on firing at 
this building. We hit the parapets of the forts which were made of 
clay or hardened earth—I should say about eight feet thick at the 
top—and made large craters; but the best effect as one would expect 
was obtained by the shell bursting inside the fort; naturally the shell 
bursting in all directions practically silenced the fort at once. 
Unfortunately we did not get to see the town until two days 
afterwards when the dead had all been cleared away. I only saw one 
small heap of about half-a-dozen, who were evidently killed by our 
shells; but there were no others lett in any place that we shot at. 
Still you could see that there had been a great deal of effect because 
there was a lot of dried blood about, and a lot of pieces of men which, 
