The Passionate Friends
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.
I fell thinking of the dead.
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