No soldier in a proper state of mind ever thinks of the dead. At times
of course one suspects, one catches a man glancing at the pair of boots
sticking out stiffly from under a blanket, but at once he speaks of
other things. Nevertheless some suppressed part of my being had been
stirring up ugly and monstrous memories, of distortion, disfigurement,
torment and decay, of dead men in stained and ragged clothes, with their
sole-worn boots drawn up under them, of the blood trail of a dying man
who had crawled up to a dead comrade rather than die alone, of Kaffirs
heaping limp, pitiful bodies together for burial, of the voices of
inaccessible wounded in the rain on Waggon Hill crying in the night, of
a heap of men we found in a donga three days dead, of the dumb agony of
shell-torn horses, and the vast distressful litter and heavy brooding
stench, the cans and cartridge-cases and filth and bloody rags of a
shelled and captured laager. I will confess I have never lost my horror
of dead bodies; they are dreadful to me--dreadful. I dread their stiff
attitudes, their terrible intent inattention. To this day such memories
haunt me. That night they nearly overwhelmed me.... I thought of the
grim silence of the surgeon's tent, the miseries and disordered ravings
of the fever hospital, of the midnight burial of a journalist at
Ladysmith with the distant searchlight on Bulwana flicking suddenly upon
our faces and making the coffin shine silver white. What a vast trail of
destruction South Africa had become! I thought of the black scorched
stones of burnt and abandoned farms, of wretched natives we had found
shot like dogs and flung aside, rottenly amazed, decaying in infinite
indignity; of stories of treachery and fierce revenges sweeping along in
the trail of the greater fighting. I knew too well of certain
atrocities,--one had to believe them incredibly stupid to escape the
conviction that they were incredibly evil.
For a time my mind could make no headway against its monstrous
assemblage of horror. There was something in that jagged black hill
against the moonshine and the gigantic basin of darkness out of which it
rose that seemed to gather all these gaunt and grisly effects into one
appalling heap of agonizing futility. That rock rose up and crouched
like something that broods and watches.