"Sahib," said a man of an Indian mountain battery, when we were in
standing camp in the shadow of Kilimanjaro, "you are obviously not
infantry, and you are as certainly not cavalry. What _are_ you?"
That was a question I had often asked myself since the day I enrolled
as a signaller in the East African Mounted Rifles, locally known as
"Bowker's Horse"--a deceptive nickname, for at that time we rode
mules. We got horses later on, and uniforms and accoutrements all of a
piece; but in the early days of the war we were an irregular corps of
straight-shooting, cheery, undisciplined scallywags, wearing garments
of our own devising, saluting or not as the notion occurred to us,
and literally pawing the ground in our simple-minded anxiety to ride
straight into "German East" and crumple up such slight resistance as
we expected to meet. The corps was composed, for the most part, of
settlers, a sprinkling of juniors from Government offices, an estate
agent or two, and a leavening of those nondescripts who float round any
new colony, to be inevitably washed up when any piece of adventure or
devilry comes along.
That was how we looked at it then; we were booked for the great
adventure, and were prepared to start on it out of hand with our own
rifles and ammunition and a few scrag-ends of mule.
For some days after the declaration of war Nairobi looked as it does
in race week, and I wonder someone didn't get killed in the crush at
Mackinnon's Corner, where all the principal roads converge. White
men, brown men, black men, motors, bicycles, and mules seethed about
all over the crossing. Somalis would bring up a batch of mules to be
passed by the vet., and those would kick and bite their way through
the maelstrom, whilst our local scorchers, who had blossomed into
motorcycle despatch-riders, added to the joy of things by coming down
Sixth Avenue like streaks and jamming on both brakes when within a few
feet of the crush. This pleased the mules, of course.
It was an education to watch some of our bar-room buck-jumpers at play
on the lightsome blend of fiend and whirlwind called a mule. There was
a man in my troop called Eccles, who wasn't a "Buffalo Bill" at the
best of times, and they served him out a mustard-crossed white mule
that looked like some kind of loathsome slug. It kicked you when you
tried to mount, and promptly bucked you off if you succeeded in getting
on--a _perfect_ brute, in short.
Eccles's first experience was at a parade in Government Road, when the
mule took him out in front of the troop, deposited him on the hard
road, and then capered about him, apparently undecided whether to
trample on him or eat him. When we got out into camp the mule developed
a habit of lying down in every stream or bit of water we crossed, and
after a few days of this sort of thing Eccles decided to lead his mule.
One morning, however, the animal disappeared into the blue, to the huge
delight of Eccles, until a heliogram came through from the next camp
to say that the mule had arrived there. Eccles scarcely spoke for two
days. We sent a couple of Somali scouts over, and they, five Europeans,
and a crowd of porters spent a futile morning in trying to catch the
brute.
Then our regiment commandeered all the mules and horses from that camp.
This one refused to be caught, but attached itself to the corps, and,
as we could neither catch it nor get rid of it, both Eccles and the
mule enjoyed complete happiness.