§ 1
Mary and I did not meet again for five years, and for nearly all that
time I remained in South Africa. I went from England a boy; I came back
seasoned into manhood. They had been years of crowded experience, rapid
yet complicated growth, disillusionment and thought. Responsibility had
come to me. I had seen death, I had seen suffering, and held the lives
of men in my hands.
Of course one does not become a soldier on active service at once for
the wishing, and there was not at first that ready disposition on the
part of the home military authorities which arose later, to send out
young enthusiasts. I could ride and shoot fairly well, and accordingly I
decided to go on my own account to Durban--for it was manifest that
things would begin in Natal--and there attach myself to some of the
local volunteer corps that would certainly be raised. This took me out
of England at once, a thing that fell in very well with my mood. I
would, I was resolved, begin life afresh. I would force myself to think
of nothing but the war. I would never if I could help it think of Mary
again.
The war had already begun when I reached Durban. The town was seething
with the news of a great British victory at Dundee. We came into the
port through rain and rough weather and passed a big white liner loaded
up feverishly from steam tenders with wealthy refugees going
England-ward. From two troopships against the wharves there was a great
business of landing horses--the horses of the dragoons and hussars from
India. I spent the best part of my first night in South Africa in the
streets looking in vain for a bedroom, and was helped at last by a
kindly rickshaw Zulu to a shanty where I slept upon three chairs. I
remember I felt singularly unwanted.
The next day I set about my volunteering. By midday I had opened
communications with that extremely untried and problematical body, the
Imperial Light Horse, and in three days more I was in the company of a
mixed batch of men, mostly Australian volunteers, on my way to a place I
had never heard of before called Ladysmith, through a country of
increasing picturesqueness and along a curious curving little line whose
down traffic seemed always waiting in sidings, and consisted of crowded
little trains full of pitiful fugitives, white, brown, and black,
stifled and starving. They were all clamoring to buy food and drink--and
none seemed forthcoming. We shunted once to allow a southbound train to
pass, a peculiar train that sent everyone on to the line to
see--prisoners of war! There they were, real live enemies, rather glum,
looking out at us with faces very like our own--but rather more
unshaven. They had come from the battle of Elandslaagte....
I had never been out of England before except for a little
mountaineering in the French Alps and one walking excursion in the Black
Forest, and the scenery of lower Natal amazed me. I had expected
nothing nearly so tropical, so rich and vivid. There were little
Mozambique monkeys chattering in the thick-set trees beside the line and
a quantity of unfamiliar birds and gaudy flowers amidst the abundant
deep greenery. There were aloe and cactus hedges, patches of unfamiliar
cultivation upon the hills; bunchy, frondy growths that I learnt were
bananas and plantains, and there were barbaric insanitary-looking Kaffir
kraals which I supposed had vanished before our civilization. There
seemed an enormous quantity of Kaffirs all along the line--and all of
them, men, women, and children, were staring at the train. The scenery
grew finer and bolder, and more bare and mountainous, until at last we
came out into the great basin in which lay this Ladysmith. It seemed a
poor unimportant, dusty little street of huts as we approached it, but
the great crests beyond struck me as very beautiful in the morning
light....
I forgot the beauty of those hills as we drew into the station. It was
the morning after the surrender of Nicholson's Nek. I had come to join
an army already tremendously astonished and shattered. The sunny
prospect of a triumphal procession to Pretoria which had been still in
men's minds at Durban had vanished altogether. In rather less than a
fortnight of stubborn fighting we had displayed a strategy that was
flighty rather than brilliant, and lost a whole battery of guns and
nearly twelve hundred prisoners. We had had compensations, our common
soldiers were good stuff at any rate, but the fact was clear that we
were fighting an army not only very much bigger than ours but better
equipped, with bigger guns, better information, and it seemed superior
strategy. We were being shoved back into this Ladysmith and encircled.
This confused, disconcerted, and thoroughly bad-tempered army, whose
mules and bullocks cumbered the central street of the place, was all
that was left of the British Empire in Natal. Behind it was an
unprotected country and the line to Pietermaritzburg, Durban, and the
sea.
You cannot imagine how amazed I felt at it. I had been prepared for a
sort of Kentucky quality in the enemy, illiteracy, pluck, guile and good
shooting, but to find them with more modern arms than our own, more
modern methods! Weren't we there, after all, to teach _them_! Weren't we
the Twentieth and they the Eighteenth Century? The town had been shelled
the day before from those very hills I had admired; at any time it might
be shelled again. The nose of a big gun was pointed out to me by a
blasphemous little private in the Devons. It was a tremendous, a
profoundly impressive, black snout. His opinions of the directing wisdom
at home were unquotable. The platform was a wild confusion of women and
children and colored people,--there was even an invalid lady on a
stretcher. Every non-combatant who could be got out of Ladysmith was
being hustled out that day. Everyone was smarting with the sense of
defeat in progress, everyone was disappointed and worried; one got short
answers to one's questions. For a time I couldn't even find out where I
had to go....
§ 2
I fired my first shot at a fellow-creature within four days of my
arrival. We rode out down the road to the south to search some hills,
and found the Boers in fair strength away to the east of us. We were
dismounted and pushed up on foot through a wood to a grassy crest. There
for the first time I saw the enemy, little respectable-looking
unsoldierlike figures, mostly in black, dodging about upon a ridge
perhaps a mile away. I took a shot at one of these figures just before
it vanished into a gully. One or two bullets came overhead, and I tried
to remember what I had picked up about cover. They made a sound,
_whiff-er-whiff_, a kind of tearing whistle, and there was nothing but a
distant crackling to give one a hint of their direction until they took
effect. I remember the peculiar smell of the grass amidst which I
crouched, my sudden disgust to realize I was lying, and had to lie now
for an indefinite time, in the open sunlight and far from any shade, and
how I wondered whether after all I had wanted to come to this war.
We lay shooting intermittently until the afternoon, I couldn't
understand why; we went forward a little, and at last retired upon
Ladysmith. On the way down to the horses, I came upon my first dead man.
He was lying in a crumpled heap not fifty yards from where I had been
shooting. There he lay, the shattered mirror of a world. One side of his
skull over the ear had been knocked away by a nearly spent bullet, and
he was crumpled up and face upward as though he had struggled to his
feet and fallen back. He looked rather horrible, with blue eyes wide
open and glassily amazed, and the black flies clustering upon his
clotted wound and round his open mouth....
I halted for a moment at the sight, and found the keen scrutiny of a
fellow trooper upon me. "No good waiting for him," I said with an
affectation of indifference. But all through the night I saw him again,
and marvelled at the stupendous absurdity of such a death. I was a
little feverish, I remember, and engaged in an interminable theological
argument with myself, why when a man is dead he should leave so queer
and irrelevant a thing as a body to decay....
I was already very far away from London and Burnmore Park. I doubt if I
thought of Mary at all for many days.
§ 3
It isn't my business to write here any consecutive story of my war
experiences. Luck and some latent quality in my composition made me a
fairly successful soldier. Among other things I have an exceptionally
good sense of direction, and that was very useful to me, and in Burnmore
Park I suppose I had picked up many of the qualities of a scout. I did
some fair outpost work during the Ladysmith siege, I could report as
well as crawl and watch, and I was already a sergeant when we made a
night attack and captured and blew up Long Tom. There, after the fight,
while we were covering the engineers, I got a queer steel ball about the
size of a pea in my arm, a bicycle bearings ball it was, and had my
first experience of an army surgeon's knife next day. It was much less
painful than I had expected. I was also hit during the big assault on
the sixth of January in the left shoulder, but so very slightly that I
wasn't technically disabled. They were the only wounds I got in the war,
but I went under with dysentery before the relief; and though I was by
no means a bad case I was a very yellow-faced, broken-looking
convalescent when at last the Boer hosts rolled northward again and
Buller's men came riding across the flats....
I had seen some stimulating things during those four months of actual
warfare, a hundred intense impressions of death, wounds, anger,
patience, brutality, courage, generosity and wasteful destruction--above
all, wasteful destruction--to correct the easy optimistic patriotism of
my university days. There is a depression in the opening stages of fever
and a feebleness in a convalescence on a starvation diet that leads men
to broad and sober views. (Heavens! how I hated the horse
extract--'chevril' we called it--that served us for beef tea.) When I
came down from Ladysmith to the sea to pick up my strength I had not an
illusion left about the serene, divinely appointed empire of the
English. But if I had less national conceit, I had certainly more
patriotic determination. That grew with every day of returning health.
The reality of this war had got hold of my imagination, as indeed for a
time it got hold of the English imagination altogether, and I was now
almost fiercely keen to learn and do. At the first chance I returned to
active service, and now I was no longer a disconsolate lover taking war
for a cure, but an earnest, and I think reasonably able, young officer,
very alert for chances.
I got those chances soon enough. I rejoined our men beyond Kimberley, on
the way to Mafeking,--we were the extreme British left in the advance
upon Pretoria--and I rode with Mahon and was ambushed with him in a
little affair beyond Koodoosrand. It was a sudden brisk encounter. We
got fired into at close quarters, but we knew our work by that time,
and charged home and brought in a handful of prisoners to make up for
the men we had lost. A few days later we came into the flattened ruins
of the quaintest siege in history....
Three days after we relieved Mafeking I had the luck to catch one of
Snyman's retreating guns rather easily, the only big gun that was taken
at Mafeking. I came upon it unexpectedly with about twenty men, spotted
a clump of brush four hundred yards ahead, galloped into it before the
Boers realized the boldness of our game, shot all the draught oxen while
they hesitated, and held them up until Chambers arrived on the scene.
The incident got perhaps a disproportionate share of attention in the
papers at home, because of the way in which Mafeking had been kept in
focus. I was mentioned twice again in despatches before we rode across
to join Roberts in Pretoria and see what we believed to be the end of
the war. We were too late to go on up to Komatipoort, and had some
rather blank and troublesome work on the north side of the town. That
was indeed the end of the great war; the rest was a struggle with
guerillas.
Everyone thought things were altogether over. I wrote to my father
discussing the probable date of my return. But there were great chances
still to come for an active young officer; the guerilla war was to
prolong the struggle yet for a whole laborious, eventful year, and I was
to make the most of those later opportunities....
Those years in South Africa are stuck into my mind like--like those pink
colored pages about something else one finds at times in a railway
_Indicateur_. Chance had put this work in my way, and started me upon
it with a reputation that wasn't altogether deserved, and I found I
could only live up to it and get things done well by a fixed and extreme
concentration of my attention. But the whole business was so interesting
that I found it possible to make that concentration. Essentially warfare
is a game of elaborate but witty problems in precaution and
anticipation, with amazing scope for invention. You so saturate your
mind with the facts and possibilities of the situation that intuitions
emerge. It did not do to think of anything beyond those facts and
possibilities and dodges and counterdodges, for to do so was to let in
irrelevant and distracting lights. During all that concluding year of
service I was not so much myself as a forced and artificial thing I made
out of myself to meet the special needs of the time. I became a
Boer-outwitting animal. When I was tired of this specialized thinking,
then the best relief, I found, was some quite trivial
occupation--playing poker, yelling in the chorus of some interminable
song one of the men would sing, or coining South African Limericks or
playing burlesque _bouts-rimés_ with Fred Maxim, who was then my second
in command....
Yet occasionally thought overtook me. I remember lying one night out
upon a huge dark hillside, in a melancholy wilderness of rock-ribbed
hills, waiting for one of the flying commandoes that were breaking
northward from Cape Colony towards the Orange River in front of Colonel
Eustace. We had been riding all day, I was taking risks in what I was
doing, and there is something very cheerless in a fireless bivouac. My
mind became uncontrollably active.
It was a clear, still night. The young moon set early in a glow of white
that threw the jagged contours of a hill to the south-east into
strange, weird prominence. The patches of moonshine evaporated from the
summits of the nearer hills, and left them hard and dark. Then there was
nothing but a great soft black darkness below that jagged edge and above
it the stars very large and bright. Somewhere under that enormous
serenity to the south of us the hunted Boers must be halting to snatch
an hour or so of rest, and beyond them again extended the long thin net
of the pursuing British. It all seemed infinitely small and remote,
there was no sound of it, no hint of it, no searchlight at work, no
faintest streamer of smoke nor the reflection of a solitary fire in the
sky....
All this business that had held my mind so long was reduced to
insignificance between the blackness of the hills and the greatness of
the sky; a little trouble, it seemed of no importance under the Southern
Cross. And I fell wondering, as I had not wondered for long, at the
forces that had brought me to this occupation and the strangeness of
this game of war which had filled the minds and tempered the spirit of a
quarter of a million of men for two hard-living years.