Now I made as bad a soldier (except at heart) as Raffles made a good
one, and I could not say a harder thing of myself. My ignorance of
matters military was up to that time unfathomable, and is still
profound. I was always a fool with horses, though I did not think so at
one time, and I had never been any good with a gun. The average Tommy
may be my intellectual inferior, but he must know some part of his work
better than I ever knew any of mine. I never even learnt to be killed.
I do not mean that I ever ran away. The South African Field Force might
have been strengthened if I had.
The foregoing remarks do not express a pose affected out of superiority
to the usual spirit of the conquering hero, for no man was keener on
the war than I, before I went to it. But one can only write with gusto
of events (like that little affair at Surbiton) in which one has
acquitted oneself without discredit, and I cannot say that of my part
in the war, of which I now loathe the thought for other reasons. The
battlefield was no place for me, and neither was the camp. My
ineptitude made me the butt of the looting, cursing, swash-buckling lot
who formed the very irregular squadron which we joined; and it would
have gone hard with me but for Raffles, who was soon the darling devil
of them all, but never more loyally my friend. Your fireside fire-eater
does not think of these things. He imagines all the fighting to be with
the enemy. He will probably be horrified to hear that men can detest
each other as cordially in khaki as in any other wear, and with a
virulence seldom inspired by the bearded dead-shot in the opposite
trench. To the fireside fire-eater, therefore (for you have seen me one
myself), I dedicate the story of Corporal Connal, Captain Bellingham,
the General, Raffles, and myself.
I must be vague, for obvious reasons. The troop is fighting as I write;
you will soon hear why I am not; but neither is Raffles, nor Corporal
Connal. They are fighting as well as ever, those other hard-living,
harder-dying sons of all soils; but I am not going to say where it was
that we fought with them. I believe that no body of men of equal size
has done half so much heroic work. But they had got themselves a bad
name off the field, so to speak; and I am not going to make it worse by
saddling them before the world with Raffles and myself, and that
ruffian Connal.
The fellow was a mongrel type, a Glasgow Irishman by birth and
upbringing, but he had been in South Africa for years, and he certainly
knew the country very well. This circumstance, coupled with the fact
that he was a very handy man with horses, as all colonists are, had
procured him the first small step from the ranks which facilitates
bullying if a man be a bully by nature, and is physically fitted to be
a successful one. Connal was a hulking ruffian, and in me had ideal
game. The brute was offensive to me from the hour I joined. The details
are of no importance, but I stood up to him at first in words, and
finally for a few seconds on my feet. Then I went down like an ox, and
Raffles came out of his tent. Their fight lasted twenty minutes, and
Raffles was marked, but the net result was dreadfully conventional, for
the bully was a bully no more.
But I began gradually to suspect that he was something worse. All this
time we were fighting every day, or so it seems when I look back. Never
a great engagement, and yet never a day when we were wholly out of
touch with the enemy. I had thus several opportunities of watching the
other enemy under fire, and had almost convinced myself of the
systematic harmlessness of his own shooting, when a more glaring
incident occurred.
One night three troops of our squadron were ordered to a certain point
whither they had patrolled the previous week; but our own particular
troop was to stay behind, and in charge of no other than the villanous
corporal, both our officer and sergeant having gone into hospital with
enteric. Our detention, however, was very temporary, and Connal would
seem to have received the usual vague orders to proceed in the early
morning to the place where the other three companies had camped. It
appeared that we were to form an escort to two squadron-wagons
containing kits, provisions, and ammunition.
Before daylight Connal had reported his departure to the commanding
officer, and we passed the outposts at gray dawn. Now, though I was
perhaps the least observant person in the troop, I was not the least
wideawake where Corporal Connal was concerned, and it struck me at once
that we were heading in the wrong direction. My reasons are not
material, but as a matter of fact our last week’s patrol had pushed its
khaki tentacles both east and west; and eastward they had met with
resistance so determined as to compel them to retire; yet it was
eastward that we were travelling now. I at once spurred alongside
Raffles, as he rode, bronzed and bearded, with warworn wideawake over
eyes grown keen as a hawk’s, and a cutty-pipe sticking straight out
from his front teeth. I can see him now, so gaunt and grim and
debonair, yet already with much of the nonsense gone out of him, though
I thought he only smiled on my misgivings.
“Did he get the instructions, Bunny, or did we? Very well, then; give
the devil a chance.”
There was nothing further to be said, but I felt more crushed than
convinced; so we jogged along into broad daylight, until Raffles
himself gave a whistle of surprise.
“A white flag, Bunny, by all my gods!”
I could not see it; he had the longest sight in all our squadron; but
in a little the fluttering emblem, which had gained such a sinister
significance in most of our eyes, was patent even to mine. A little
longer, and the shaggy Boer was in our midst upon his shaggy pony, with
a half-scared, half-incredulous look in his deep-set eyes. He was on
his way to our lines with some missive, and had little enough to say to
us, though frivolous and flippant questions were showered upon him from
most saddles.
“Any Boers over there?” asked one, pointing in the direction in which
we were still heading.
“Shut up!” interjected Raffles in crisp rebuke.
The Boer looked stolid but sinister.
“Any of our chaps?” added another.
The Boer rode on with an open grin.
And the incredible conclusion of the matter was that we were actually
within their lines in another hour; saw them as large as life within a
mile and a half on either side of us; and must every man of us have
been taken prisoner had not every man but Connal refused to go one inch
further, and had not the Boers themselves obviously suspected some
subtle ruse as the only conceivable explanation of so madcap a
manoeuvre. They allowed us to retire without firing a shot; and retire
you may be sure we did, the Kaffirs flogging their teams in a fury of
fear, and our precious corporal sullen but defiant.
I have said this was the conclusion of the matter, and I blush to
repeat that it practically was. Connal was indeed wheeled up before the
colonel, but his instructions were not written instructions, and he
lied his way out with equal hardihood and tact.
“You said ‘over there,’ sir,” he stoutly reiterated; and the vagueness
with which such orders were undoubtedly given was the saving of him for
the time being.