At night a chill wind whooped down the valleys, and we were smothered
in swirls of damp mist. Lions roared nightly, and it was possible to
stumble on a sleeping rhino at any time of the day. They used to charge
patrols and disorganize them, and one of our fellows who had strayed
away from his troop met one face to face. His mule streaked one way, he
another, and the rhino nearly broke his back in vamoosing in a third
direction. The trooper was lucky to have found the beast in a timid
mood, for the rhino's only amusement lies in chasing unoffending sons
of empire through thick thorn scrub, though he's usually in too bad a
temper to realize what fun it is.
There is something peculiarly terrifying about a rhino charge in the
camp at night. You awake and jump to safety all in a moment, impelled
by the nightmare terror that belongs to the time when fear ruled the
world, and the rash ancestor who slept on the ground made a spring for
the nearest branch on the approach of some primeval monster.
We all have our affectations, and that of the old hand was indifference
to the game peril.
"You mustn't believe all the wild beasts stories you hear," he would
observe to the tenderfoot. "They are mostly frightful exaggerations."
Then the nervous one would look up and observe a rhino gazing morosely
at these intruders on the privacy of his own special tract of forest.
The next moment the tenderfoot would be in the arms of a peculiarly
inhospitable tree, wondering what was going to happen next. Certainly
life in what the kinema posters call "Nature's Zoo" holds excitements
of a kind unknown to the army in any other quarter of the globe. I used
to think out problems unprovided for by the Hague Convention, such as,
if a small British patrol met a small enemy patrol in thick bush, and
at the same time flushed an angry rhino, what would be the correct
procedure? Should the combatants combine to blot out the rhino, and
then proceed with their own quarrel, or should they hurriedly retire
and fight somewhere else? I never heard of any such contingency
arising, but it easily might have done so, and it is certain that once,
just as one of our patrols sighted a German patrol, a rhino charged our
rear, and two of our men had to fall out to tackle it, whilst the rest
fired on the Germans.
Our first engagement was at Longido, in the first November of the war.
Our regiment had a tough day, and lay for many hours under fire without
food or water, but I am not out to write the story of that skirmish.
It doesn't come under the heading of the humors of the campaign,
although there was a certain grim humor knocking about all the same.
Our men were so new to that sort of thing that it took them some time
to realize they were under heavy fire, and just when the firing was
hottest one of them was waving a toothbrush and asking, "Any of you
chaps lost a toothbrush?" whilst another shouted, "Come over here, you
fellows. Lovely shooting!"
It was during the season that followed, when, as a correspondent of
an English paper neatly put it, we "held the railway and shouted for
help," that we realized the real, inner meaning of monotony. At first
we expected to get going in a week, then we put the time forward to
months, and finally we resigned ourselves. To live in standing camp for
the rest of our natural lives, to do long patrol, short patrol, and
"bait" patrol for ever and ever seemed the best we could hope of life.
Letters arrived with some regularity, for we were then only some few
miles over the border. Papers drifted through to us, and we knew more
of the happenings in Europe than we did of our own campaign, though
occasionally we gleaned some items of local interest from the English
papers. It annoyed us to see an alleged illustration of one of our
"scraps," in which smart-looking men on ramping horses were represented
as fighting in open country at five hundred yards, whilst in reality
it was done by untidy men on mules, in thick bush, at forty yards. The
real thing was much better than the artist's conception of it.
There are, as I have implied, three kinds of patrol--the long patrol,
on which you spend many days scouring the burning veldt for Germans,
and hoping you won't find them; the short patrol, on which you spend
one day doing the same thing; and the "bait" patrol, on which you
spend the cold and cheerless hours before dawn wandering round the
camp and hoping the Germans won't find _you_. On the latter it is the
earnest desire of your King and country that the noise of your getting
shot will alarm the camp before the attack takes place. If, on these
occasions, you meet a lion, or any vermin of that kind, you must allow
him to bash you on the head and dine off your limbs rather than raise
a false alarm. One of our fellows met a lioness with cubs on one of
these cheery rambles, and was only saved by the fact that he and his
mule both froze stiff with terror, and baffled her by not running away.
He moved off slowly at last, and she followed the patrol till dawn,
obviously puzzled by these strange beings.
Of long patrol your first intimation of the joy in store for you
usually is an excited clucking of the telephone buzzer at 2 a. m.
on a particularly joyless morning. "Kaar-kuk-kuk! Kaar-kuk-kuk!" it
observes, exactly like a hen that has laid an egg. Of course, the
obvious thing to do is to fling a boot at the 'phone and go to sleep;
but we signallers have a strong sense of duty, so we call the adjutant,
who takes a mean revenge by telling us to be saddled up in fifteen
minutes and go out for ten days to some "ticky" and waterless part of
Africa which is, according to the 'phone, swarming with Germans.
The next ten minutes is spent in feverishly collecting gear, with which
you stagger through the night to your disgusted steed, who, when he has
realized what is in store for him, behaves as though he had never seen
you, nor your saddle, nor the helio stand, nor anything that is yours
in his life before, this being his habit in all moments of emergency.
Then you take a few frantic tugs at your cigarette before the "No
smoking" order is passed down, and ride out into the unknown.