"I landed twenty carboys of carbolic to-day, and a lot of other Hospital
stores, by talking football to a man who knows the game, chiefly from the
ball's point of view."
"That counts to you, Colonel," called out Beauvayse, the Chief's fair,
boyish junior aide-de-camp, from the bottom of the table, "against the
awful failure you were grousing about this morning."
"Ah! you mean when I tried to frighten some Sisters of Mercy into leaving
the town by painting them a luridly-coloured verbal picture of the perils
of the present situation," said the Colonel. His keen hazel eyes twinkled,
though his mouth was grave. "I ought to have remembered that you can't
scare a religious, be he or she Roman Catholic, Buddhist, or Mohammedan,
by pointing to the King of Terrors. He does to frighten lay-folk, but for
the others Death's grisly skeleton-hand holds out the Keys of Heaven."
"What will it hold for some of us others, I wonder," said one of the
dinner-guests, a moody-looking civilian, of Semitic features, whose
evening clothes made a dull contrast with the mess-dress of the Staff
officers gathered about their Chief's table in his quarters at Nixey's
Hotel on the Market Square, "before this month is out?"
The host leaned forward to reply:
"My dear Mr. Levison ... special mention in Despatches Above, with honours
and promotion for those of us who have been approved worthy. For others,
who have tried and failed, a merciful overlooking of blunders, a generous
acceptance of the intention where the performance came short.... And for
the rest ... a grave on the yellow veld in the shadow of a rock or
thorn-bush, with the turquoise sky of day overhead, shimmering in the
white-hot sunshine; or an ocean of purple ether, ridden by what old Lucian
called 'the golden galley of the regnant Moon.' That in South Africa; and
at home in England, one's memory kept warm and living in, say, three
hearts that recognised the best in one, and loved it. A mother's heart,
the heart of a friend--and _hers_!"
There was no insincerity of flattery in the hum of applauding comment that
ensued. All earnest original thought has beauty; and this man could not
only think, but clothe his thoughts in direct and simple language, and add
to it the charm of well-modulated and musical utterance.
"I call that good enough," said the senior Staff Officer, a dark,
handsome, eagle-faced Guardsman, who bore a great historic name, "for you
or me or any other fellow here--we're not taking into account the living
dead ones."
The Chief leaned forward in his characteristic attitude, and spoke, a
long, lean brown forefinger emphasising the sentences, his hawk-keen
glance driving them home. "I tell you, Leighbury, that some of those, the
rottenest corpses among 'em, will shed their grave-clothes, and rise up
and do the deeds of living men before, to quote Levison, this month is
out. Never take it for granted that a man is dead until the grass is
growing high over his bare bones, and don't make too sure even then!
Because to-day I saw such dry bones move--and it's an instructive if an
uncanny sight."
"Whose were the bones, Colonel?" called out the handsome young aide at the
bottom of the table.
The host, his thin, brown fingers busy at the clipped moustache, was
listening to the Mayor of Gueldersdorp, who sat upon his right. He
withdrew his attentive eyes from that stalwart sportsman's broad, ruddy
countenance, to glance smilingly at the fair, handsome face, and reply:
"Whose? Well, up to the present they have belonged to the Dop Doctor."
"That man!" The Mayor, in the act of taking another slice of the roast,
looked round as at the mention of a name familiar, shrugging his portly
shoulders. "Surely you know who the fellow is, Colonel? He drifted up here
from Cape Colony three years ago. A capable--confoundedly capable man,
handicapped by a severe muscular strain," the Mayor's twinkling eye
heralded the resurrection of an ancient jest--"contracted in lifting a
cask of whisky--a glass at a time!"
White teeth flashed in alert tanned faces. The schoolboy laugh went round
the table; then the Babel of talk rose up again. Most of these men were
quite young ... their seniors barely middle-aged, not a man but was what
they themselves would have termed both "fit" and "keen." They had wrought
for many days in the erection of sand-bag defences, in the digging of
trenches, in the drilling of Baraland Irregulars and Rifle Volunteers and
the newly-enrolled Town Guard. This was the pleasant social time of lull
before the storm, and they were not to get many more good dinners or
peaceful nights in bed for a long siege to come. They did not show
outwardly the tension of strung nerves that waited, as the whole world
waited, for the echo of the first shot, rattling amongst the low hills to
the south. Nor did it occur to them that there was anything heroic or
dramatic in their quiet unaffected pose. Gathered together upon one little
spot of border earth destined to be the vital, tragic, throbbing centre of
great events and tremendous issues, actions glorious, and deeds scarce
paralleled upon the page of History, let us look upon them, well-groomed,
well-bred, easy-mannered, cheery, demolishing the good dishes furnished by
the _chef_ of Nixey's Hotel, with the hungry zest of schoolboys,
exchanging fusillades of not very brilliant chaff.
Scraps of scientific and technical conversation with reference to
telephonic and telegraphic installations between outlying forts and
headquarters, electric communication with mines, automatic
warning-apparatus, the most effective methods of constructing bomb-proof
shelters, the comparative merits of Maxim and Nordenfeldt, crossed in the
air like fragments of bursting projectiles, impelled by those admirable
engines of destruction. Mingled with reminiscences of cricket, golf,
tennis, polo, and motoring, then in its infancy; anecdotes new and old,
and conjectures as to what the fellows at home were doing? Hurlingham and
Ranelagh, Maidenhead and Henley, Eton and Oxford, Sandhurst and Aldershot,
Piccadilly in the season, Simla in the heats, the results for Kempton Park
and Newmarket Races--of all these they talked, with rhino and elephant
shooting and the big battues of pheasants now taking place in the Home
Midlands and up North. But though the watch-fires of their pickets burned
upon the veld, and though the Boer lay in laager over the Border, of him
they said not one word. That reticence upon the vital point was
characteristically English. The excitable Gaul would have wept, kneaded
his manly bosom, and alluded to his mother; the stolid Muscovite would
have wept also, referring to his Little Father, the Czar; the Teuton would
have poured forth oceans of turgid sentiment about the Fatherland; the
dignified Spaniard would have recognised himself as a warrior upon the
verge of a Homeric struggle, and said so candidly; the hysterical American
would have sung "Hail, Columbia!" and waved pocket-handkerchief-sized
replicas of the Star-Spangled Banner until too exhausted to agitate or
vocalise. But to these men indulgence in sentiment was "bad form," and
unrestrained patriotic utterance merely "gas," tainting the air with an
odour as of election-eggs or sulphuretted hydrogen. Therefore were many
words to be avoided.
A pose, if you will, an affectation, this studied avoidance of all
appearance of enthusiasm or excitement; showing the weak spot in the
armour of these heroes, henceforth to be of epic fame. But Man is
essentially a weak being. It is only when the immortal spirit of him
nerves the frame of perishable bone and muscle that he rises to heights
that are sublime. Such souls of fire burned within these men, that when
the Wind of Death blew coldest and the lead-and-iron hail beat hardest,
they only glowed more fiercely radiant; and Want and Privation, instead of
weakening, only seemed to make them more strong;--strong to endure, strong
to foresee plots and avert perils and oppose wit to cunning, and strategy
to deceit; so strong that, by reason of their strength, that little
frontier town became a fortress of Titans. And their names, other than
those I have given them in this story, shall go ringing down the grooves
of Time, until Time itself shall be no more.