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Our Lord Who did the Ox command
To kneel to Judah’s King,
He binds His frost upon the land,
To ripen it for spring;
To ripen it for spring, good sirs,
According to His Word-
Which well must be, as you can see
And who shall judge the Lord?

When we poor fenners skate the ice,
Or shiver on the wold,
We hear the cry of a single tree
That breaks her heart in the cold
That breaks her heart in the cold, good sirs,
And rendeth by the board-
Which well must be, as you can see
And who shall judge the Lord?

Her wood is craized and little worth
Excepting as to burn,
So we may warm and make our mirth
Until the Spring return;
Until the Spring return, good sirs,
With marish all abroad
Which well must be, as you can see:
And who shall judge the Lord?

God bless the master of this house
And all that sleep therein
And guard the fens from pyrat folk
And save us from all sin!
To walk in charity, good sirs,
As well we may afford
Which shall befriend our later end,
Accounting to the Lord.

–Old Lincolnshire (?) Carol

FROM the little hill near Bloemfontein Old Fort you command ninety miles of country towards Kimberley; and when Kimberley besieged uses her searchlight you can see the wheeling beam as clearly as Israel saw the Pillar of Flame. If you are loyal you ascend the hill singing with your friends, and gloat over the ringed city. If you are disloyal you creep up without music, lie down among the boulders, hidden from the police, and whisper to fellow-disloyalists: ‘Kimberley’s all right.’

Allen, of the Bloemfontein Banner, though he did not gloat, was loyal. He had sailed to Cape Town from Edinburgh forty years ago, a master-printer moved suddenly to take up the missionary work which in those days was Scotland’s special field. There he met the Kaffir; saw through him with keen eyes, and, it is to be suspected, saw through the missionary; for he backslid to the stick and the case on an early upcountry paper. Then he married a Dutch girl — a connection of President Brand, and well-to-do. She led him across the Orange to a fat, lazy land full of cattle, slaves, and game; for the Free State ‘farmers’ had not yet discovered the European skin-market.

He farmed a little on his wife’s property; shot many a head of buck; went to Kimberley when De Beers was ‘Colesberg Kopje’; lost money in diamond mining, but made it helping to print the first paper on the fields; lost his wife of typhoid, refused more matrimony, and rediscovered his old love in the office of the young Bloemfontein Banner.

He was convinced that unless you treated Kaffirs much as the Dutch treated them, they were worthless; but he could not bring himself to the treatment which came so easily even to his adored Katie. Wherefore, he exchanged his farm for a little tin-roofed house on the outskirts of Bloemfontein, grew the roses of that favoured land, and for a few languid hours daily condescended to the Banner press-room.

It was an idyllic life, that began — after he had looked to his roses — with the little stroll through the broad streets where all Bloemfontein nodded friendlily; that led, with many street-corner conversations, across the market-square to his worn stool in the long, low Banner office. Here he crooned over the stick till lunch-time, locked up the page with old-fashioned wooden quoins, told the Kaffirs to pull a proof, corrected it, tolerant of many misprints (forty years in the Free State wear down Edinburgh standards), told another Kaffir to start the rheumatic old engine that temperately revolved the big press, and loafed out into the market-square.

The linen suit, long yellow beard streaked with white, the brown eyes behind the brass spectacles, the black velvet smoking-cap, and the green carpet-slippers were as well known in the square as the market building itself. When men saw the corner of Allen’s shoulder prop the corner of the chemist’s shop, where they sell Dutch and English medicines, they knew the Banner would be selling on the streets in ten minutes. When he shuffled between the ox-wagons, the bentwood pipe purring in his beard, Bloemfontein knew that Allen went to his roses and his evening’s levee in the veranda. His wife’s relations were many, and of exceeding friendliness. A few, nieces chiefly, were good-looking, and Allen’s home offered an excellent base for large young women from small villages, who came to shop in the capital. One or other of them would house-keep for him the year round, and all Katie’s kin were superb cooks.

As head of the Banner’s press-room, Allen was supposed to be well-informed politically, and on occasion would speak a good word for a backward advertiser. His levees were attended by English shopkeepers, farmers who, at their wives’ bidding, had stayed over to shop, and the small fry of casual stationmasters, guards, telegraphists, and subordinate civil servants. Then he would spread his slippered feet on the veranda rail, drink coffee, and, as a burgher of forty years’ standing, would expound the whole duty of the Free State, which was to keep itself to itself, and ‘chastise the Hollander.

In later years the Banner troubled him a little. He had seen it change from a leisurely medium for meditations on cattle-raising, reports of sermons, rifle meetings, and the sins of local officials, all padded with easy clippings out of English and Cape Town papers, to a purposeful, malignant daily under control of a German whose eyes, Allen said, were too close together, and whose aim in life seemed to be ridicule of the English.

Now Allen had no special love for the English, of whom there were many in Bloemfontein. He had seen them beaten in ’81, and though at the time he tried to explain what the resources of England were, had seen them stay beaten before all his world. They irritated him in some of their manifestations as an over-pernickety breed who would not when they first arrived think at the standard ox-wagon pace of two and a half miles an hour. But the sun and the soft airs, the lazy black labour, and the much talk by the wayside soon wheeled them into line.

What need, then, to worry and taunt them as did Bergmann? — for none, having once drunk of the Orange River, would return to stoepless, umbrellaed, unhallowed, competitive days in dirt at elbow-push of hungry equals.

English folk might be strangers in the land, but who, if you came to that, were the Bergmanns, the Enselins, the Hoffmanns, the Badenhorsts, the Sauers, and a hundred others? Moreover, Bergmann, when he was not prying into folk’s ancestry, had helped to found a thing called the Bond, and, by the same token, had been publicly rapped over the knuckles for it by none other than Allen’s uncle-in-law, the great Sir John Brand, who had written a letter that made Bergmann furious.

Allen agreed with his uncle-in-law. His vision did not extend much farther than a ford across the Orange River and a Dutch girl’s face under her cap, smiling at him as he clumsily whacked the oxen till they came up panting and wet-flanked into this, the land of his peace. For years Allen felt that Bergmann of the narrow eyes and the inveterate hate would trouble their large quiet, but — but he was accustomed to his seat in the Banner office, and his hands, itching for the type, drew him there daily. His tongue alone was unshackled by custom, and here the Scot in him died hard.

‘I’m a student o’ political economy myself,’ he said one evening, in the face of a most wonderful sunset. ‘An’ I’ve obsairved from my visits to Pretoria that the Hollander is a swine. He’s like the teredo in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (There ought to be a copy of it in the office. Chambers is out of date.) Aye, Elsie’ — this to his wife’s second cousin, a lady with Pretoria graces —’I know ye marrit one, an’ ye can e’en tell him when ye go home my opeenion of his nationality. The Hollander’s the curse of the Transvaal. What for? Because the Transvaal’s eegnorant. The Hollander edges in, an’ edges in, an’ takes the tickets an’ runs the machinery o’ State. My word, if I trusted your Gert, Elsie, that’s the most eegnorant job—composer ever foaled, tho’ I took him for the sake o’ the family, an’ he’s some kin to Mrs. Bergmann too—I say, if I let your Gert order the new type, whaur’d I be? Preceesely whaur the Transvaal’ll be before many years.’

He emptied his cup and went on.

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‘We must keep the Hollander out o’ here. With our system o’ education—an’ for that we must thank old Brand, my Katie’s uncle—they’ve precious little chance at our public offices. But they’ll try, an’ what they cannot wreck, they’ll ruin. There’s over-much runnin’ to and fro o’ Hollanders these days between Pretoria an’ here.’

No one cared to speak out in Aunt Elsie’s presence but three or four women of old Free State stock murmured assent. Time was when the Free State; better born and better educated, had been roughly looked up to by the unshorn Transvaal. Now the Transvaalers had grown rich beyond the wildest hopes of the Free State, and, if possible, ruder. In a hundred ways—principally by the Hollanders—it was borne in upon the Free State that she must take the second place in a new order. The Pretoria women, too, shopped at Johannesburg; and when one visited them they flaunted their crockery and their curtains in their sisters’ faces. Husbands grew rich in Pretoria. ‘Hollanders go away when they have made the money,’ one of the company hinted. ‘They are not good sons of the soil. Now, if we had not been cheated out of our diamond mines we should have been rich in the Free State too.’

‘Yes, but we know how to spend it when it is made,’ said Aunt Elsie, flushing angrily. ‘We do not count each lump of sugar in the coffee. And our funerals! You should just see! I had four new black silk dresses this year when the typhoid was so bad. At the back of our house’ — she leaned forward impressively, bulging in her French corsets — ‘there is a heap this high’ — she lifted an arm — ‘of empty tins. All tinned things. Our English servant is so wasteful.’

‘Ye’ve just hit it, Elsie. It’s the tins do the mischief. Ye’ve never had more than the rudiments of airth-scratchin’ — I’ll not call it farmin’—up yonder, but ye’re bywith that even. Last time I went to Groblaars after the buck, the whole deestrict was livin’ on options fra’ the minin’ companies—options an’ State grants. They’d done with the last pretence o’ farmin’ tobacco, mealies an’ all. They’d not put their hand to a single leevin’ thing, as I set here, except to order tinned goods fra’ Johannesburg — tinned things an’ sweeties. Ah, the tins!’

‘That is why you have so much typhoid,’ said the wife of a Bloemfontein saddler — an Old Colony girl, and shook her fingers daintily above the bowl of peach conserve.

‘They’ll pay for their tinned things. They’ll have Hollanders. Bergmann’s gone to his account, and I’ve naught to say of him. Mrs. Bergmann owns the Banner an’ his picture’s in the press-room. I asked him once if he wished to make the Free State a warld power. Almighty! The man was angry!’ ‘He only wrote the truth about the English. Bergmann was a verree great man. He started the Bond. He was a true patriot,’ said Aunt Elsie.

‘Ay. Verra like your husband in Pretoria, Elsie.’ ‘It is because you’re English in your heart. All you Uitlanders are alike.’

‘Take notice here, Elsie.’ Allen wagged a type-blackened forefinger across the table. ‘Bergmann picked up that talk about Uitlanders when he helped make the Bond that’s the curse of Africa; though Brand, my Katie’s uncle, told him he was sowin’ seeds o’ dissension where none should exist. He’s talked Uitlander, an’ I’ve set it up for him in Dutch an’ English. Pretoria picked Uitlander up from Bergmann, because you’re no’ clever enough in Pretoria to do more than steal — you Hollanders. Pour you another cup o’ coffee an’ stop fiddlin’ with your bonnet-strings, Elsie. Twenty year now — I mind the time there was none of it — you’ve been crying “Uitlander this, Uitlander that,” till you’re fair poisoned with it. There were no Uitlanders till Bergmann and the Bond that was his master, as he was mine, an’ Pretoria created them an’ stirred ’em up. Ye’ve heard o’ Frankenstein’s monster? It’s a common slip ye’re warned against in Edinburgh, not to let a contributor call him Frankenstein, an’ was a shillin’ fine in Blackwood’s. Well, we’ll let that pass. Ye’ve been at great pains to make a Frankenstein’s -‘

‘Ah, you always talk so sillee, uncle. I do not understand.’ ‘Ye will, Elsie — ye will. I’m foreman o’ the Banner press-room, an’ Mrs. Bergmann’s employee, because I just love the sound o’ the type, an’ I’m a burgher o’ forty years to boot — that’s more than most o’ them are. An’ I love my country. Wait a while, Elsie. Ye’ll see the end o’ what I’ve set up the beginning of.’

Young Dessauer, Mrs. Bergmann’s second cousin, now editor of the Banner, was doing his best to out-Herod his deceased uncle, whose portrait, in grievous oils, adorned the press-room. He had all the old man’s fluency, and none of his power.

Allen remembered — he had a long memory — the first time he had set up the phrases, ‘our Nation’ (upper case N), ‘the Afrikander Nationality,’ and the necessity for closer union.’ Now, it seemed, he composed little else.

Young Dessauer spent half his time in company of Hollanders from Pretoria — smooth-faced Continentals in black Albert coats and white linen—who spoke all tongues except honest Taal, and visited the President eternally. The compositors of the Banner talked much of the import of the leading articles that appeared after these interviews.

‘I’ve only one opeenion,’ said Allen, correcting proofs by the window: ‘if we go on as we’re gaun, we cut our own throats, neither more nor less. We need no dealin’s wi’ the Transvaal.’ This, of course, was duly reported to Dessauer, who spoke to Allen before the men. Said Allen, pushing up his spectacles: ‘It’s no odds to me if you dismiss me this day – except I’m thinkin’ you’ll find very few duplicates of Allen on the premises when ye want to make up the paper.’

‘That is not thee point,’ said young Dessauer, pulling up his collar. ‘You are no true son of the soil if you talk treason in this way. And in this office!’

‘And when did your father trek across the Orange?’ said Allen. ‘Fifteen years after me! He outspanned at my Katie’s door in the big drouth, an’ she took you from your mother’s arms an’ ye puked over the front of her frock. They’d gi’en you a bit o’ biltong to chew, because your mother had no milk, and it wrenched your prood stomach, Dessauer. Well, I’m waitin’ on ye. I was a burgher before ye were breeched. Maybe I’m too old to understand this talk o’ treason ye’re so dooms free with.’

‘I was only saying you have no right to talk so – unpatriotically in this office.’

‘If my country, that I’ve never set foot out of since the ‘Sixties, is to be jockeyed into a war by you an’ the likes o’ you, an’ that old fool that runs about writin’ his name in the girls’ plush autograph albums, I must not talk, eh? ‘Fore God, man, don’t I set up the mischief ye do? I helped Bergmann build his Uitlander bogey that served him so well. What more d’ye want? Ye’ll stop my talkin’ – me, a burgher o’ the Free State that was married to Brand’s niece, and out in Moshesh’s war, and a Blackwood’s man, before your mother met your father! Ye go too fast, Dessauer. This is the Free State—yet. We’ll wait till the Transvaal have annexed us before we shut our mouths. Lock up the telegraph page!’

Said Mrs. Bergmann of the placid face and the white hair when this rebellion was reported: ‘Yes — yes, nephew, he is no good in the politick, but he knows more about the paper than even I do. You know nothing, nephew, and he is cheap. Later on, when when things are different, we can teach him.’

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The summer of that year was a sad time for the stranger in Bloemfontein. Thicker and thicker grew the press of agitated Hollanders at the President house; wilder and wilder grew Dessauer’s lead and blacker grew Allen’s face. Through many weeks he had heard nothing but appeals to God the Mauser — had set up fathoms of it — had seen advertisements give place to Government proclamations, and had wondered who paid for them.

Strangers from the North accused him of Uitlander sympathies in the market-square; his compositors were insubordinate, and old friends cut him in the street with ostentation. To be fair, these same friends would come by twilight among the roses, and in whispers ask what the Free State expected to gain from the war, and why — this in the smallest of whispers — the burghers had not been more freely consulted in the matter.

‘It’s too late to ask now. Ye’ve never read Carlyle’s French Revolution. I have. You’d not understand if I explained, but we’ve been denouncin’ each other for lack o’ patriotism till we’re just afraid to speak our own minds,’ he answered. ‘So, ye’ll note, the State has been sold for a handful of Transvaal tobacco — and we’ll not get the tobacco. We’ve asked the Hollander to put foot on our neck an’ he’s done it. He’ll bring in the Transvaaler that’s been livin’ on other people these past ten years. He’ll not reform now. Did ye note that Transvaal commando that’s camped behind the station? So long as they can lift cattle on the border they’ll leave us alone. If they come back they’ll take our stock. Mark my word! If we win we’ll be annexed by the Transvaal. If we lose—’

‘But you must not say that England will win, uncle,’ said the second Pretoria niece in charge, with a coquettish flirt of the head. ‘That would be traitorous. Look how we beat England in the last war!’

‘I’m saying nothing but that we’ll be annexed by the Transvaal. We’re annexed already, an’ not a man of us lifted his voice. They’ll strip us hoof, horn, an’ hide. Here endeth the Free State!’ He turned up the empty coffee-cup with a chuckle.

‘I’ll have to pay for this, but the truth’s never economical.’

In default of pony, horse, and bridle, they commandeered Allen to the tune of 450 sterling, and a field-cornet of old acquaintance tried to improve the occasion by a few remarks on treason. ‘Ye’re a fool,’ said Allen. ‘I know how much of a fool ye are, an’ that’s more even than your mother knows. Ye’re not a fool on your own account, which would be sense of a sort. Ye’re a Hollander’s fool sold like a Kaffir. An’ ye may tell whom ye please. Now, if ye’ll pack awa’ wi’ your folly on Niekirk’s best pony, which I see ye’ve stole for your own ends, I’ll e’en go to office an’ set up young Dessauer’s notion o’ the Free State as a Warld-Power.’

A few days later, Aunt Elsie came down from Pretoria on a visit, and explained how a field-cornet, her own nephew, had taken from her farm near Bloemfontein three yoke of bullocks after, for due consideration, he had promised to spare them.

‘That’s the beginnin’ o’t,’ said Allen grimly. ‘Hoof, horn, an’ hide, I think I said, Elsie?’ ‘How do I know what you said?’ she answered pettishly. ‘He gave me no commando—note. He drove them off the farm. He should have taken old Kok’s who is rich.’

‘But he’s gaun to marry Annette Kok after the war,’ Allen grinned.

‘Oh, that is it—is it? — the rascal! But what should I do? My husband is so busy — so busy at Pretoria—’ ‘No? He’ll not have gone on commando then?’ ‘And my brother, he is with Cronje. And my other brother, he is with Botha, and they will not write to me. They are so busy shooting rooineks— ‘and I want my oxen back. Here am I — an official’s wife — and they take my oxen, look you!’

‘Why don’t ye write to Botha or Cronje? — maybe they’ll listen. You’re the third woman o’ our kin that’s come to me to-day complainin’ o’ just this kind o’ trouble. An’ we’re only at the beginnin’!

‘Oh, but the war will be over in a few weeks. You think! Look how we have shot them everywhere. There are not enough more men in England to come. My husband says so.’

‘Elsie, woman, ye don’t know what war means nor I either. But we’ll know before the end. And,’ he added irrelevantly, ‘ye’ve not even seen Edinburgh.’

The commandos went southward in trains — Free Staters and Transvaalers together, each boasting against the other what they would do with the rooineks. It was rumoured that the Old Colony had risen even to the sea; that the Bond had thrown off the mask and established a Federal Government in Cape Town, and that the Queen of England had refused to sign the declaration of war.

Men returned by scores from Colesberg and the South on the easily granted furlough of those early days, and, laughing, said there was no need to fight — their friends across the border were doing it all for them. Here and there a man had been wounded, but the game went beyond all expectation.

Kimberley was cut off from help; Mafeking hung like a ripe plum ready to drop at a touch; Ladysmith was, incidentally, surrounded while the commandos swept towards the sea. Molteno, Middleburg, Aliwal North, Burghersdorp, Hopetown, Barkly West — they gave the well-known tale of the districts — were up and out; and the others behind them only waited till the Federal commandos should come through.

‘An’ I’m no’ fond o’ the word Federal,’ said Allen, as he set it up. ‘It’s the last step after annexation, instead o’ the first to it.’

The wounded arrived from Belmont (a few of them — the rest were placed in outlying hospitals) and Graspan and Modder. Allen did not quite understand the drift of the telegrams describing these events. Many, who till then had written regularly to their wives, ceased, and though the authorities explained that they were busy, the women felt uneasy. Moreover, there was a rumour — they learned it from a Transvaal commando going South and forgetting to pay for chickens — that the Free Staters had not done so well at Modder.

Then came the week of joy — Colenso, Stormberg, and Magersfontein in three blinding flashes. The Federals could hardly believe their luck — seventeen guns (it was thirty by the time the news reached Bloemfontein), 4000 killed, wounded, and prisoners! Surely the English would now see the error of the cruel war that they had forced upon a God-fearing race. The Banner said so, demanding indemnities and annexations by the irreducible minimum.

‘We’re lyin’ too much,’ thought Allen, toying with the tweezers ‘I’ve no supersteetious reverence for truth, but this is sheer waste. H’m! The English are fightin’ us wi’ native troops. Are they? It’s no’ likely.

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‘They’re floggin’ prisoners an’ burnin’ an’ ravishin’ broadcast? No. That’s no’ likely either. Conteenuous black type tires the eye.’

He went on with his copy. ‘We’ve blown the guts out of a Highland Brigade; wiped up half a regiment o’ North Countrymen; an’ got all the guns o’ Buller’s brigade. I’m thinkin’ it’s no good policy to offend Scotland.’ He paused for a moment, penetrated with a new idea.

‘Fore God, it’s war! If we lose we’ll not get what the Transvaal got in ’61. It’s either us or Scotland — an’ that means all England. I wish we had some news o’ what they’re sendin’ by way of an army. They’re a dour folk, the Englishry, when they’re wrought to it.’

But that information was denied to the Bloemfontein Banner — whatever they might have known at Pretoria. Now and again a rumour broke through of a bay crowded with ships, of lines congested with troops, of a horrible silence of preparation, broken by words of caution from more far-seeing Bond friends in Cape Town. But no harm, so far, had befallen the Free State.

The men at the Front were all well – the field-cornets said so. They wrote little, but they fought with magnificent skill; never losing more than a score at the outside, and those, curiously, men of few kin. For visible sign of their success Bloemfontein could see the prisoners, and, better still, Kimberley searchlight whirling, whisking, and appealing. They made good jokes, men and maidens together, after dark, on the hill by the Old Fort, and the police, always armed, grinned tolerantly.

Thither, as was his custom in these later days, Allen with a lantern to guide his old feet among the rocks. The rumours troubled him. Young Dessauer’s face when he filled out the telegrams did not accord with their joyful news. Officials talked fluently and uneasily, but their eyes had not the inward light of victory, and, above all, people were forbidden to go down to the railway-station and speak to the English prisoners.

The Stormberg captives, the men taken round Colesberg, the two companies forgotten in a retirement, and neatly caught while waiting to entrain, were entirely sullen and uncommunicative, or uttered foolish threats of vengeance; but the later varieties, gathered here and there to the westward, and sent under escort of a northern commando to wait their turn for the up-country trains, spoke in another key. They were not grateful for small attentions. They asked for accommodation as by right, and begged their guards to be civil while yet chance offered.

The effect of this loose talk was counteracted by over-much official explanation, and it disturbed Allen’s mind. Telegrams came and went, commandos passed by day and night, firing out of the carriage windows in honour of Bloemfontein, and closed ambulance trains went northward. Nothing was constant except the flare from Kimberley—sometimes lifted like appealing arm, sometimes falling like a column, often broken as with horrible mirth.

‘See! See!’ said a girl, sitting on a camp-stool or hill. ‘Now Rhodes is hungry! He shakes his finger’

‘Oh, no,’ said the boy with her. ‘He is asking Cronje to stop firing while he eats his horse.’

‘I wish we could hear the guns.’

‘It is too far,’ said the boy. ‘Did you see Cronje’s big gun go across from here? It was a fine rooinek-shooter. My brother’ — he puffed his cigarette proudly — ‘Is in the States Artillery.’ ‘I like the little buk-buk guns best,’ the girl replied. She opened a basket and ate a sandwich, brushing away the crumbs from her Sunday frock.

‘I think I can hear guns,’ she said and clapped her hands.

‘That’s only thunder on the veldt,’ said Allen, coming up behind her. ‘Good evening, Ada Frick.’ ‘Oah ! Is that you, Mister Allen? You have come to see how your friends over there get on? They are having—ah—how do you Uitlanders say it? — a hot time in the town to-night.’

The boy, annoyed at an interrupted flirtation, passed over to a Johannesburg policeman squatted in the shadow. Bloemfontein was then policed in large part from Johannesburg; and Bloemfontein did not like it.

‘There is old Allen,’ he said. ‘You know about him? He is a traitor.’

‘Get out — go down,’ the man shouted. ‘Yes, you with the white beard. You have no business here, you old rebel. Keep with the other Uitlanders!’

‘Are you a Portugee, or a Hollander, or a Dane, or what?’ Allen replied. ‘You can’t talk the Taal.’ As a matter of fact he was a young German, rather in request at certain Bloemfontein tea-parties. He replied: ‘Go away. We know all about you. You’ve come up here to signal to Kimberley with that lantern.’ Allen laughed aloud. ‘Then if you know that much, you may know I marrit President Brand’s niece. I’ve not been reckoned a traitor for some few years. But we’re all traitors now.’

‘Huh!’ said the girl, with a giggle. ‘We all know that the Brand people were not true sons of the soil. That is not a good family to belong to, these times.’

Allen was used to personal insult — who had never known a hard word till six months ago — but the reflection on his Katie’s kin cut him to the bone.

‘At any rate,’ he began, but bit off the sentence. After all, it was no fault of the girl’s that she was tainted with native blood. A Frick — and all the earth that had eyes knew whence the Fricks had drawn their black hair crisping at the temple and the purplish moons at the base of their finger-nails — a Bloemfontein Frick, of too-patent ancestry, had derided Brand, whose statue stands at the head of the town!

He stumbled downward, raging, pursued by the laughter of the little company. ‘Brand no son of the soil — Brand! An’ a Zarp — a Johannesburger — to tell me I’m a traitor! I’ve never hoped the English ‘ud win, but I hope it now — I hope it now! The damned, ungrateful half-breeds.’ There was a light in the Banner press-room as he passed.

‘More proclamations,’ he said bitterly. ‘They keep the job side busy these days. Maybe young Dessauer thinks he’ll be made Secretary o’ State if he does not press for the bill. What’s here, Gert?’ he asked at the door.

‘The proclamation,’ Gert grinned; and Allen watched his hands above the case.

‘That’s no English you’re setting up. What is it?’ ‘Basuto,’ said Gert. ‘The Proclamation.’ Evidently the youngster had private information, denied to his superior.

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Allen’s heart stood still. He had heard wild threats that, before long, the Basutos would be formally invited to rise against the English, but in Bloemfontein that talk was coldly received. They had, of course, employed Kaffirs to hold horses, dig trenches, bring up food and ammunition, in extreme cases to cover an advance, and always to haul guns. But no responsible man contemplated openly putting the war on a direct black and white basis, calling upon the black to rise against the white. Much of the fighting had, of design, been pitched between Zululand and Basutoland, that the two races from their hills might learn which was the power to be feared. That and the raiding of weak tribes was entirely fair, since all the world knew the English were using black troops from India and committing every horror.

But Allen, who set up young Dessauer’s telegrams, and had talked to a few prisoners since October, did his own thinking by the composing-table, while Gert set Basuto in English type — all n’s and m’s. Admitting the charges against the English, the risk to the Federals from their own allies would be … Allen thought of the outlying farms and shuddered. Then the shame of it struck him across the face. He did not believe in the Dutch treatment of the black; but that the black should be called in as an equal in this game — called in by bribes and sweet words — was a matter unbelievable. ‘An’ Brand was no true son o’ the soil, Miss Frick!’

He mopped his forehead. ‘First Bergmann an’ the Bond; then the Transvaal an’ the Hollanders; an’ then the Basutos. We’re doin’ well! We’re comin’ on! We’re gaun beggin’ to the Basutos. If they rise — but why did they not rise before? They canna expect a Magersfontein every week o’ the year. They’ve a bitter score against us. What good ‘ud their help be? … But if the English are usin’ Gurkhas, why haven’t the English used Basutos? ‘Fore God, I’d shoulder rifle to-morrow if they did! They’ve had time enough. What’s holdin’ them? . . . Oh, some one will go to Hell for this.’

Gert pulled a proof on the roller-press. Mechanically Allen pulled another, driving the types almost through the cheap pulpy paper, and stuck it on an old job file. He relit his pipe and turned out to think. A man on horseback, his ankle rudely bandaged, crossed the empty market-square gabbling to a policeman.

‘It stinks, it stinks, it stinks!’ he cried thickly. ‘Everything stinks. I have asked a hundred times for clean water. Get it.’

‘Come back to the hospital! He has got fever. He has just run out from the hospital,’ the policeman explained to Allen in the starlight, overlooking the fact that hospital patients are not, as a rule, booted, spurred, and plastered with dry mud.

‘Hospital !’ The man reined up sharply. ‘That is a lie. I have come from Hell — from Cronje’s head-laager, in Hell. They have all the guns in the world there, big and little — little and big. But they all stink. Cronje led us into Hell! I came out on my belly when the guns stopped.’

‘Yes, yes. It will be all clean in hospital. You are waking the people. Come!’

The fevered wretch’s face puckered with terror. ‘You will only take me into another laager! Let me go. I will run! Tell me where to ride! For God’s sake, where shall I ride? The veldt is alive with them, they are coming out of the ground. They are round the laager! Listen! Buk—buk—buk—buk,’ he quacked horribly, imitating the sound of a pom-pom; then, wrenching his horse free, fled at a gallop across the stale dust.

‘Run! run! run!’ The shouts died away by the railway-station.

‘What is it?’ some one called from a hotel veranda. ‘A typhoid man escaped from the hospital,’ the policeman answered.

‘But what did he say about Cronje ?’ another voice demanded.

‘Oh, he wanted to go and help Cronje shoot rooineks —a true patriot, even when he has fever.’ The policeman mounted and cantered after his patriot.

‘It does not coincide with the telegrams. The man’s right. It all stinks—o’ lies,’ thought Allen. When he reached his roses, the Free State was poorer by the loss of one burgher.

Next day he set up telegrams describing a large capture of mules by Cronje. The wire came from Pretoria. That afternoon Miss Frick complained pettishly that the police would not let people go up the Old Fort Hill to watch Kimberley light.

Then came by, very drunk, and this was remarkable, Andrew Morgan, usually of irreproachable habits, who had wool interests in the town, and till that hour had walked discreetly. His tie was under one ear his hat was battered out of shape, and his merry legs strayed all whither over the pavement. He sat on the steps of the post office, smiling at the police and the women, who expected telegrams from their men.

“Shay, you bloomin’ Dutchmen,’ he hiccupped. ‘Kimberlish relieved! No! You don’t ‘rest me for talkin’ dispeckfully your dam’ oxsh-wag’n Government. Bobbsh comin’ here! Bombard whole boilin’! G’way, you nasty ugly Zarp! Ev’rybody Bloemfontein knowsh me! Given up wool-bushnesh. Housh agent now. Take any man’s housh while he goes temp’rily Pretoria. What offersh? Yah !’

He resigned himself smiling to the embraces of the agitated Zarps; but his words, coming on the heels of many whispers, curdled the crowd as rennet curdles milk, and they drew together discussing and surmising between the ox-carts and the ammunition-wagons.

Forty-eight hours before he would have been a bold man who had dared doubt in public that Kimberley was all their own. Now people more or less faced the notion.

‘What do you think, Mr. Allen?’ said one of the two or three hundred Koopmans of the district. ‘You see all the telegrams.’

‘I think what I thought from the beginnin’. We’ve listened to lies too long to care for truth. But at the same time no one likes bein’ lied to less than a liar.’

‘Allen, you’re an Uitlander at heart.’ It was the old taunt—from a German this time.

‘I’m a Free Stater: but it will be pairfectly surprisin’ the number o’ people that’ll find they’ve always held Uitlander sympathies—before long.’

‘They have not the men—they have not the men! All our predikants say so,’ cried a farmer of a far north-eastern district.

‘And there are all the Powers of Europe, too, France and Russia. They will never allow such things. But I wish my man would write.’ This was the wife of a French photographer. ‘No. All Europe is against them.’

page 6

‘We’ll see,’ said an English bank employee. ‘When they come —’

‘When they come. But they will never come. Be careful!’

The bank clerk laughed. ‘I told you from the beginning that they would come. And they will come. They will come here: and they will go on to Pretoria. We told you from the first.’

‘They will not if you Free Staters fight, instead of running away,’ shouted a wounded man of the Vryheid commando, and his hairy fellows applauded. ‘You have good houses and plenty of cattle — you will not fight for them. You know the English will take them all — all — all!’

‘You showed them the way,’ Allen interrupted in the Taal. Many voices agreed; for the northern commandos had a keen eye for cattle, and did not always distinguish between the disloyal Dutch across the border and the agitatedly loyal Free Stater on the hither side.

‘Then you should fight. If you don’t fight, our President says it will be the worse for you. Almighty! My father did not get his farm by sitting still. No! He shot the black-stuff off it first, then he enjoyed God’s blessing. Go you and do likewise. The northern commandos are taking all the weight of the war.’

‘But it’s all in our country,’ said Allen, as the man swung himself on to his pony. ‘Ye’ve forgotten that little matter—they haven’t forgotten it by Jagersfontein.’

‘You were right, Allen,’ old Van Zoelen, that had been a member of the Raad, growled in his beard. ‘We are much annexed by the Transvaal already. I said it would be so.’

As far as one can find out, this day was the beginning of the Bad Time in Bloemfontein. No two souls agree in any one account of it. It is said that Kruger came down from the North and, with Steyn, went westward, direct to Poplar Grove. It is said he did no such thing: that the first news came in from a broken commando of Transvaalers who had been peppered in the open from three consecutive kopjes by hidden infantry, and, seeing that the rooineks were not fighting fair, had come away. This, again, is denied by the Transvaalers, who assert that Kruger himself attempted to check a fleeing Free State commando after Poplar Grove, and even threatened to order his Johannesburg police to fire upon them. The Free Staters — some of them — admit that they told the President that if he gave such an order they would return the fire.

Then, they say, began systematic cattle-lifting on the part of some Transvaalers who had escaped from Cronje’s laager and headed for the Vaal, driving everything with a hide on it before them. Then, they say, began the trouble with the foreign commandos — a matter now forgotten. And all this while there was no certain knowledge of any one thing under Heaven except that somewhere to the westward lay an Army!

Bloemfontein did not know what an Army was like, but her sons told her. She agreed — it was curious how quickly the crowds decided this — to disregard the wonderful telegrams of the Banner, who said that France, Russia, and Germany were in arms against England. Certainly, no true patriot could fail to believe that France, Russia, and Germany would in the end rescue a poor and pious State. But the question before Bloemfontein, who counted her distance from the Army in miles, was —would the Army bombard the city — as the city had sent men to bombard Kimberley, Mafeking, and Ladysmith? Also — this was not spoken above the breath — how soon could some sort of compromise be patched up which would remove these excellent Transvaal commandos — to fight, of course, fifty or a hundred miles farther on, but to fight and steal elsewhere?

Men poured in from the southern border with word that something very like another Army was forming in those parts. They told tales of a new brand of Englishry from across the water, who lay out all day with a pillow-case full of cartridges, quite happy if they bagged — that was their horrible word — two or three patriots in eight hours. Oh, yes, there were scores of victories to report — but they always fell to the other commando. Of course, the foreign Powers—

‘But the Army is here,’ said Bloemfontein sourly at last, watching President Kruger drive to the railway station. That was the time when Kaffir boys laughed at the Dutch women who tried to give them orders; when men thrust the keys of their houses upon strangers with English names, and begged them to look after their villas while they went North for a little; when young Kennedy, of the Royal Souvenirs, wounded and a prisoner in hospital, kissed the nun in the presence of the Sister-Superior, and all three laughed; when a Dutch predikant came by night to Mallett of the Wesleyan Church, and, weeping with rage, said he would burn his Bible if God forgot the Free State; when Joyce, at the saddler’s shop, made the seventeen-foot Union Jack in a back chamber in ten hours; when the Fricks of all colours sat up in dreary assembly burning papers whose discovery might have damaged the health of Papa Frick; when seats in the Pretoria train sold at a premium, and the English of the town found their advice much sought after.

‘Do — do you think they will bombard us?’ asked Mrs. Zandt humbly of the thirteen-year-old daughter of the bank employee. She had come to borrow a Union Jack from the girl’s mother. ‘I’m afraid we shan’t,’ said the child, remembering many insults from the Zandt brood. ‘I am afraid it is like what my father says.’

‘Oh, what did your dear father say:’ Mrs. Zandt clasped her hands. ‘He says you will take out the keys to Us on a tea-tray when we come for them. I am sorry you will not be shelled—’

‘Hush, dear,’ said her mother, entering, ‘you mustn’t talk like that to Mrs. Zandt.’

‘I don’t care! She laughed when I told her about Uncle Tom being shelled in Kimberley. Now she comes to borrow the Flag.’

‘But they are so close — so verree close! My God! My God! Did all my people die for this, Mrs. Pardrew?’ Mrs. Zandt collapsed weeping on the sofa.

‘I don’t know,’ said Mrs. Pardrew. ‘I don’t know whether my brother is alive, yet. Oh, go away! Don’t cry here! You Dutch are so clumsy. What did you want to interfere in the war at all for, you sillies?’

Little Jenny Pardrew’s father spoke true. They gave up the keys decked with tricolour ribbons at the bidding of a solitary civilian first into Bloemfontein from no higher motive, he says, than to get rooms at the Club. They waved many Union Jacks, and those who could not go North discovered that their hearts had ever beaten for progress and reform.

Somewhere on the veldt ran one President babbling of foreign intervention. Behind him, more to be feared, was another threatening death to all who bowed the knee to the invader. North and East the Transvaal commandos were drawing off with Free State cattle because, their commandant said, the Free Staters were cowards.

Bloemfontein — and now she began to see why — had only a few wounded English prisoners in her. The bulk were at Pretoria — good hostages against evil treatment should that Army… It was impossible that the Army could reach Pretoria. But the Army was here — in the town and outside the town — a vast clay-coloured ring. Bloemfontein rose after a wakeful night, climbed the hill by the Fort, and looked down upon the tentless legions. They were wet, silent, and sulky — sulky even to Papa Frick, more English than the English, smirking across the green veldt, proud if he could catch the eye of the humblest ‘Officier.’

page 7

‘Well, they’ve come,’ said Allen, slipping off his coat in the press-room. He had gone out to watch the entry of the troops and had seen the beginnings of an ugly Kaffir riot put down by the strong hand. This did not look as if the English had employed natives in the war. The press-room was empty; the gas-engine was cold, and the Kaffirs sat impudently on the composing-table. Allen nodded at Bergmann’s portrait.

‘It’s a peety you’re not alive, old man! Ye’ve done well for my country. If there’s knowledge or device beyond the grave ye must be wrigglin’ now…. What’ll we have in hand for today? ‘Fore God, there’s no paper, o’ course. Gone like rats, all of them.’

Said a voice in Dessauer’s room: ‘You see the situation, madam. I’m only a special correspondent, but I have authority to inform you —er— that we, that is the Army, take over the paper. At least, the office, and the type, and the men. The name will not be continued.’

‘I see,’ said Mrs. Bergmann. ‘I suppose it is all right. My editor has, unfortunately, gone away. He will come back when Bloemfontein is reoccupied. But now, of course, you are masters here. I suppose I can take away my private papers. I had come here for that. You see, we did not expect you here so soon.’

Vincent, of the Universal Press Agency, did not say that he had thrashed an exhausted pony down the street for the very purpose of forestalling Bergmann’s widow. This was one of the occasions when the British Army had condescended to act on information received. ‘I am afraid you —ah— cannot. An officer of the Staff will be here in a few minutes to seal everything.’ Mrs. Bergmann turned white, and bit her lip. ‘So there is nothing further. It would only be putting you out to ask you to stay here.’ ‘I see,’ said Mrs. Bergmann, and rose up, her hands saintlily folded, the mirror of affliction. ‘If you will be good enough to send here as many of the compositors and so on as may be in the town I should be very much obliged. We’re anxious to print a little proclamation. The men will be paid their regular wages.’

Vincent entered the press-room, rubbing his hands joyously, and confronted Allen in green carpet-slippers, velvet smoking-cap, faded beard, brass spectacles and all. ‘Hullo! What are you doing here;’ ‘Just waitin’ for orders. I’m foreman.’ Vincent glanced about with suspicion. A large and dusty man dropped from his horse and staggered in stiffly. It was the chief correspondent of the Transatlantic Syndicate. ‘Hullo, Corbett! We’ve commandeered the Banner, lock, stock, and barrel—by order. You’re on the staff, too — by my order.’

‘I’ve got to describe the entry, my son. They’ve cut us down to two hundred and fifty words.’ ‘Nothing but official wires going tonight, Corbett. The Censor told me so. Hold the fort here while I go up to Government House and get the Little Man’s proclamation for Brother Boer. He wants it printed in today’s paper. He told me to organise a newspaper staff. You’re on it.’ ‘Today’s paper? Say, this is history,’ said Corbett, with deep relish. ‘We’re making it. The Syndicate can wait. I’ll hold the fort.’

‘No one is to touch anything till Daubeny comes down. He’ll seal up all the private papers of the office. I’ve broken the news to Mrs. Bergmann, and she don’t like it. Lend me your pony and I’ll appoint you editor.’ Vincent stumbled out and galloped away. Corbett moved over to the file of the Banner as it lay by the window.

‘H’m,’ he said, critically scanning the previous day’s issue. ‘I guess this will be about the sharpest curve any paper’s ever swung. Did you —’ he looked at Allen with a smile — ‘did you believe any of this stuff about our men burning and ravishing and being forced to fight under fire of their own guns?’ ‘My business was to set it up,’ said Allen impassively, though his heart beat hard. ‘Ain’t you English?’

‘I’m a burgher of the Free State since Eighteen Fifty odd. But — I was born in Scotland. You’ll be an American?’

‘Yes, I’m an American. What do you think of your war?’

‘Just about what you’d think if ye’d seen the country ye loved an’ lived in clean thrown away by a fool and a liar. That’s the little an’ the long o’t. Tell me now,’ Allen went on huskily, ‘what truth is there in that’ — he nodded toward the open file —’that the English used native Indian troops against us?’

‘Oh, it’s only a lie just as big as any of the others about the fifteen thousand Russians at Sand River, or the invasion of London, or your three killed and five wounded, or anything else. Have you been fed on that stuff since the war?’ Corbett looked out of window at a widow in black. ‘Poor devils! Poor devils!’

The woman entered — not that pious widow of saintly habit who had gone away ten minutes before, but a virago unchained. Gert and four compositors followed her. In the offing, alert, uneasy, expectant, hung a small crowd of black and half-breed boys who in time of peace hawked the Banner. They watched with open mouths.

‘We have come,’ she shrieked, ‘for some private letters of — of my dead husband. If you are anything like what they call an English gentleman.

Corbett’s smooth face lit with the blandest of smiles. ‘Well, madam, as Eugene Field said of himself, I was livin’ in a tree when I was caught. I’m only a semi-civilised American. If you wish to appeal to my finer instincts, they perished long ago in the stress of this campaign. But if you will indicate in what manner—’

‘Oh, you silly, talking fool. Do you know who I am? I am his widow.’ She pointed to the picture on the wall.

‘Was he killed in this war?’ said Corbett. ‘You have my sincerest—’

‘No! No! No! I want some papers from this office. Gert, go to the office and get them.’

Corbett rolled one eye at the young Dutchman.

‘Mister Gert?’ he said. ‘Happy to make your acquaintance. This places the affair on a different footing. May I ask —umm— where you come in?’

‘Compositor,’ said Gert of the black finger-nails without stirring.

‘Then I’m afraid the lady will be likely to lose a comp if you act on her instructions. Nothing in the office must be touched till the arrival of—’

‘I tell you in three weeks you will be driven out of Bloemfontein and shot to pieces! I tell you there will not be a rooinek left in the country! I tell you I will remember this when you go to prison for the winter! It will be cold in the iron sheds. You will see! Let me take away my private letters. You only want money. You can sell all the rest—’

page 8

‘Hullo!’ said the Honourable Wilfred Daubeny, Captain on the Staff of the Field-Marshal Commanding-in-Chief, torn by Vincent from his first fair meal in three weeks. He was as filthy as the rest of the Army. In one hand he held a stick of aventurine sealing-wax, and in the other a cheap glass seal of French manufacture, representing a dove with an olive-branch over the legend ‘Amour’ — all fished out of a Presidential pen-tray.

‘Thank God!’ said Corbett fervently. ‘This gentleman, madam, will be only too happy to talk to you in the office — over yonder. Have you brought the proclamation, Vincent? We must set it up at once. Go on, Daubeny, you’ll like her.’

He indicated the office at the far end of the press-room and wiped his brow. ‘For undiluted craziness, Vincent, your war lays over our Cuban business. I can’t say more than that.’

Vincent produced a printed sheet and paused, screwing up his short-sighted blue eyes. ‘How the deuce does one commandeer a paper?’ said he.

‘There’s no precedent, if that’s what’s troubling you,’ said Corbett. ‘The English are unhappy without precedents, I know. Let me try. Mister Gert & Co.! In the name of God and the Constitution of the United States — beg pardon, Vincent. I forgot it wasn’t my war. Oh, yes. There’s a foreman — so there is. What’s your name?’

‘Allen.’

‘That’s a good start,’ said Vincent. ‘Now, Mr. Allen, set up this proclamation quick. It’s for today.’ ‘Have you any preferences about type?’ said Vincent. ‘Here have I been a journalist all my life, and I don’t know one type from another, Corbett.’

‘There’s Grady outside,’ said the American. ‘He’s been in the business. Appoint him to the staff at once. Hi, Grady ! You’re appointed sub-editor of the Bloemfontein Despatch. Come in and sub-edit.’

‘I was looking for you,’ said Grady of the Unlimited Wire, dismounting. ‘Did you try to produce a paper without me? You’re a lot of penny-a-liners. Not a bad plant either.’ He sniffed round the office critically.

‘When you’ve quite done your professional antics perhaps you’ll help us bring out this dam’ conciliatory proclamation,’ said Vincent. ‘Bobs wants it thrown broadcast at Brother Boer as soon as possible. It won’t enlighten Brother Boer, but it will please Bobbins.’

‘Leave me alone. I’m thinking.’ Then to Allen, who was sorting the copy into takes, ‘Just use your old advertisements and any standing matter you’ve got.

‘It’s no’ just likely to suit the present situation. It’s sayin’ that ye used natives fra’ Injia against us.’

‘We didn’t,’ said Grady. ‘Personally, I think it was a great mistake. A few Pathans would have done you a lot of good — but we happen to be a silly people. No, the standing matter is probably useless. Got any old ads. —stereo matter?’

‘There’s the National Museum notice — an’ here’s a Vereeniging coal advertisement,’ said Allen. ‘But they’ve commandeered all the coal there; an’ it’s a far cry to Vereeniging.’ ‘Never mind,’ said Corbett, sitting on the table. ‘We’ll be at Vereeniging soon, and the National Museum’s the one place I’ve always wanted to see. Look among the stereos.’ ‘Good old stereos!’ said Vincent, turning over a pile of plated slabs. “‘The natural food for a babe is mother’s milk.” My God! D’you remember those kids at Kimberley after the relief, Grady, an’ the row of babies’ graves?’

‘Yes,’ Grady answered, with a sudden ferocity. He had been five months in the field. ‘And the refugee trains, too! Here, you’ — to Allen, who jumped at the change of tone. ‘Lord Roberts’s proclamation goes, in English and Dutch, on the front page. Fill in the rest with old advertisements. Bring me a proof when you’ve done. You’re responsible that the thing looks decent, and don’t you try to play any tricks on us.’ ‘I’m not in the habit o’ shirkin’ my work,’ said Allen stoutly.

‘I’m sick of it,’ Grady went on. ‘Kimberley and Ladysmith had to stand it, and Mafeking’s standing it now, but the minute these things get the worst of it they bang up a Union Jack and Bobs fawns on ’em, simply fawns on ’em! Look at this proclamation. He’ll be sorry for it before he’s done. I know the Dutch.’

Here the Honourable Wilfred Daubeny came out of Dessauer’s office sucking a burnt thumb.

‘She’s a lunatic — an absolute ravin’ lunatic,’ he said; ‘an’ this beastly stuff has dropped all over me. Must I seal everything here? There isn’t much wax left, and’ — he looked round the office — ‘what’s the idea of the operations?’

‘Steyn’s forgotten to take away about a ton of most interesting documents from his house,’ said Vincent. ‘I saw the Intelligence Department looking almost intelligent over it this afternoon. Perhaps we shall find something nice here.’

Allen was setting up the sentence: ‘The British Government believes that this act of aggression was not committed with the general approval and freewill of a people with whom it has lived in complete amity for so many years.’ He glanced at the portrait of the late Mr. Bergmann, thought of the Basuto proclamation, and groaned.

‘Any truth in the yarn that they’ve found a lot of cipher telegrams between Cape Town and Pretoria up at Steyn’s place?’ said Vincent.

‘I believe so,’ said Grady, ‘but it was nothing compromising. It never is, worse luck! How’s that proclamation coming on? Be quick there!’

‘I think you’d better seal the door of the office when we’ve done, Daubeny,’ said Vincent. ‘Ritson, of the Intelligence, will be down tomorrow to search the place.’

‘They’d climb in through the windows if they wanted to take anything away,’ said Grady, jerking a thumb at Gert.

‘Then Daubeny will put on a sentry till Ritson has done. One sentry for tonight on toast, Daubeny, Please. What the deuce do all these little nigger-boys want to look in at the windows for?’

‘All right. Must I stay here till you’ve done? I’m awfully hungry.’

‘You’ve no eye for history and the drama. Here we are commandeering the whole plant and outfit of a flourishing daily paper — it’s never happened before — in the heart of a captured city at eight hours’ notice, and you prefer to eat,’ said Corbett.

‘We’ll be merciful. Proof’s almost ready,’ Grady replied, as Allen slid the takes into position. ‘I don’t know Dutch, but if I find out you’ve put any hanky-panky misprints into the Dutch version, friend, you’ll hear about it.’

page 9

‘Man — man,’ said Allen suddenly, his mouth quivering under his beard, ‘I’m a — I’m a Free State burgher.’ ‘Is that any recommendation?’ ‘An’ — an’ I was one o’ Blackwood’s men once. D’ye think I’d cheat in a professional matter?’ Now Grady had been close friend of Hawke, who was crippled for life under cover of the white flag on the southern border. He answered that he had no belief whatever in anything alive within the bounds of the two States.

The forms were locked up; Allen for the first time in years started the gas-engine with his own hand, and the new-christened Bloemfontein Despatch slapped and slid through the presses.

‘No lack of paper,’ said Grady, looking at the huge block of damp sheets. ‘I wonder how many lies they’ve worked off on Brother Boer since the war began. Your men’ — he addressed himself to Allen ‘will come here tomorrow at nine on the usual wages, every man of them. By the way, how d’you sell your dam’ paper?’

‘Oh, they’ve some little native boys that usually cry it. They’ll be waiting outside. Our regular subscribers are most likely on commando.’

‘Splendid! Corbett, old man, run out and stop that buck-wagon. We’ll send a batch of papers up to Government House to please the Little Man. What d’you say to issuing the first number of the new regime gratis to the populace?’

‘No,’ said Vincent. ‘That would look as if we were anxious to obtrude Bobs’ views on ’em. Charge the old rates. Here! I’ll help fold the papers. Come on, Daubeny! Make the comps work too. Shove the papers out on the pavement, and let the nigger-boys fight for ’em. Run, you little devils! A ticky apiece is the price, and no reduction.’

‘It’s History! It’s Drama! And we’re right in the middle of the stage!’ cried Corbett on his knees among the folded papers. ‘Where under the sun did those kids spring from? It’s like New York. Here you are, sonny. Remember, it’s Despatch, not Banner today.’

‘Yes, Baas. Despatch,’ said a half-naked imp, clasping his bundle to his bosom. ‘I know Anglish.’

‘Go ahead then! Six cen—threepence a copy: no reduction. Who says the Kaffir is not in the van of progress? Listen to ’em, boys! Just listen to ’em!’

‘Despaatch! Bloemfontein Bannaar! Paaper ! Paaper ! Bloemfontein Despaatch!’ Then, high and shrill, the voice of a small Dutchling: ‘Lord Rabbat’s Proclamation! Onlee one ticky! Bannaar!’

They cut across the crowd in the market-square like minnows in an aquarium; they yelled before the shuttered shops of those who feared looting; they burst through knots of soldiers; they importuned unhappy burghers on the pavement; they dodged under the wheels of ambulances; lone pickets penetrated dusty side-streets, or invaded the back-gardens of closed houses from the Raadzaal to the railway-station. The English had come, and the day of the Amabuna had ended. Wherefore, they vehemently proclaimed the news of their race’s deliverance, while the Honourable Wilfred Daubeny, with the last of the sealing-wax, sealed the press-room doors.

Allen mechanically sought his corner by the chemist’s shop, but in the roaring come-and-go of khaki there was no peace. He saw the English, and they were many, rejoicing as men rejoice who say ‘I told you so,’ and see their words come true. He saw the extremists sullen in the side-streets, each heartening his fellow with prophecies of the Federals’ return. He heard the new ‘loyalists’ extra—loud tones raised to catch the ear of the passing soldier; and black-clad women weeping in the verandas. But these wept only for their sons and their husbands.

Here and there were the older men known to Allen since the days of Mosheshe’s war, hunters once, farmers and wool-growers now, who had not believed in closer union with the Transvaal — who had seen their words overborne first by the Hollander and next by the Hollander-infected burgher; who had still to watch the ruin of their beloved land—knowing the ruin was irretrievable. Theirs was the greater pain.

‘We’ve done well — we’ve done well,’ said Allen brokenly, to Van Zoelen, whom he found staring through the shut gates of the Raadzaal, at the head of the town.

‘We have done well,’ said the old man. ‘I spoke against it in my place there’ — he pointed to the doors on which the English had not thought it worth while to put a sentry. ‘You heard me?’

‘God help us, Van Zoelen! That was a year ago! Given away for a handful of Boer tobacco, I said…. Think you they’ll ever catch him?’

‘No. He is away. He has done it all — all — all! He will get away. He and that other will get away! Martens was right. It is good to burn our Bibles these days. God has forgotten the Free State. They drove off all my cattle at Wonderhoek before they went North. They called my son a coward. They sjamboked my black-stuff, and then they rode away to—fight on their own border! If ever again I break bread with a Transvaaler—’

He leaned his head against the railings and tugged at his long beard. ‘We owe them more than we can ever pay for sure,’ said Allen, and went on to his roses. Walking with bent head, past the abandoned houses of old-time tea-parties, and the leisurely, shirt-sleeved, sluttish life of forty good years, he cannoned into a uniform.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said he.

‘I’m sure I beg yours.’ Allen glanced at the face. A photograph of it cut from an illustrated paper was pasted in an obscure corner of the press-room.

‘You’re General McKaye?’ he said.

‘They say so. Is there anything I can do for you?’

‘Tell me now, did ye, or did ye not, use native troops fra’ Injia against us?’

‘Of course not, man.’

‘You’ll be a Highlander?’ The tone implied the rest. ‘I’m tellin’ you,’ said the General, with an equal simplicity.

‘Then, in God’s name, who kept the Basutos off us?’

‘Lagden, of course, an’ a dooms hard job it was. Where’ll you be from in the Old Country?’

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‘Me? I’m a burgher of the Free State.’

The houses on either side were empty; hastily barricaded with corrugated iron that could be kicked in by a child. Some bunches of keys lay on his tea-table in the veranda with notes from the late owners. His wife’s niece had gone three days before, leaving a black girl to see to the house.

Across the broad street with its patches of grass, a family of English sat out in their garden, drinking tea — not coffee — under the shadow of the Union Jack. A fat old woman in black walked aimlessly from one side of the way to the other, sobbing and waving black-gloved hands.

For the rest, the street was deserted, but through the hot air came the deep hum of many thousands encamped within rifle-shot. The little breezes were heavy with the smell of men and oxen and horses, and under the red flare of the sunset the veldt for miles and miles heaved and crawled with transport wagons.

A man on a spent horse rounded the corner. He kept the exact centre of the road — his rifle across his arm — sure signs he belonged to a Colonial corps.

‘Will ye drink a cup o’ coffee?’ cried Allen.

‘Will I? Try me.’ He slipped from his beast and pushed through the heavy-scented rose-bushes with a creaking of leather accoutrements. ‘Who are you?’

The soft gentle drawl betrayed the son of the Old Colony, even if the modelling of the forehead and the base of the nose had been overlooked.

‘I’m a burgher of the Free State,’ said Allen.

The boy — he was little older, for all his ten or twelve fights — dropped into the Taal at once, found a chair and stretched his legs on the rail. The muzzle of his rifle canted carelessly towards Allen’s chest, and his hand played with the trigger-guard.

‘Have you been out on commando, uncle?’ he asked deferentially.

‘No, I am a printer here.’

‘So? Let me feel your trigger-finger. That’s right. It is all soft inside. There was an old man at Colesberg very like you. I fired at him for half a day, but he was clever. A good shot, too. So now it is all done — eh? You think your Presidents will come back?’

Allen shook his head as he passed over the full cup.

‘They all say that. I hope they will try again. We have not shot enough of you to make you soft yet.’

‘They said here you used natives from India to fight us.’

‘Almighty! I wish we had. The English stood up too much and got killed. They were fools! We could have managed Stormberg without fifty dead men. And — Paardeberg too.’

‘Then you did not use natives?’

‘Of course not. We are not so stupid as you, to play black against white. Uncle, there is a very bad time coming for the burghers when your Kaffirs get free from the gun-teams. You boasted too much. One should never boast before black-stuff. Either do or not do, but don’t talk and not do.’

‘You did not use natives from India, then;’ Allen repeated heavily.

‘What fools you Dutch are! You believe anything your predikants tell you. Here is our Army. Go and look at it. You were quick enough to kodak our dead on the Natal side, and to sell them in the shops. If there had been natives you could have kodaked them. That is just like you Dutch — at one time so clever with your guns and your pom-poms, and then just Dutch.’

‘I was born a Scotsman,’ Allen half-whispered to himself.

‘Ah, but you are Dutch at heart, though. I believe that black-stuff are only black; and I think the English troops are spoiling them altogether. We shall never get the black-stuff to work for us again till they are well thrashed; but I don’t believe they are only monkies. Yon do, uncle, and you have dealt that way with them. That is why there will be trouble, I think, before we can stop it. Eh?’

‘I never thought that. I did not believe in the way we treat black-stuff. It is wrong.’

‘Oh, that is what you say now the game is up. Go over to Tabanchu and tell it to the Basutos. Tell it to the Swazis. Tell it to the Zulus. There is trouble coming from there for us, uncle — not to count all the black-stuff that the Zarps used to rob on the goldfields.’ He lit his pipe and admired his spurs for a moment. ‘You were friendly with any of the Government men here, uncle? You heard them talk?’ ‘I have heard a great deal of talk.’

‘Of course…. The President has carried off most of his letters with him — eh? It is a pity. The Imperial Staff are searching the house now. If they had let us Colonials in we should have known where to look.’

‘What do you want, then?’ Allen spoke listlessly; he was very tired. ‘Ah, now you talk well, uncle. You speak like an upright burgher.’ The boy laid his hand almost caressingly on Allen’s knee.

‘You see that the game is up. They all lied to you. Now you can speak the truth. Look!’ He fumbled in his belt and drew out half a handful of English gold. ‘I am “Wirt” Trollip’s son. You have heard of him? He is not a poor man, eh? I can give you this. My father sent me on commando — with the corps, I mean — not poor. But he can give you twice as much again and nobody will know.’

‘What for?’

‘For anything that you care to tell me that you know about the ammunition that came up from Kapstaad before the war. Oh, I don’t mean all the stuff that came up to Bloemfontein, but the big load that went up from Cape Town, and was kept at Belmont by our Government’s order at the end of August.’

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‘I know nothing about it.’

The boy laughed and jingled the sovereigns. ‘You have forgotten, uncle. We know now, of course, why you wanted the ammunition kept at Belmont. It was very useful, and you were very slim. But do you know if any letters were sent from our Government at Kapstaad about it — the ammunition at Belmont to your President here? Oh! I do not expect you saw the letters — but there must have been some joke about it in the market-square. It was so very convenient for you — the Belmont ammunition.’

‘Joke?’

‘Oh, not now, of course. The joke is ours now, but — I will give you ten or twenty of these if you can remember any man who talked about that ammunition waiting for you at Belmont. The first we knew about it was when it was said in our Raad at Kapstaad that the ammunition had been stopped at Belmont, by our Government’s order. You must have known much more here … and … they do not let us Colonials look for letters in the proper places. What is the matter, uncle?’

Allen leaned forward with his face in his hands, and rocked to and fro. The boy patted him on the back. ‘It is not the little fish we want to catch,’ said he, ‘it’s the big ones — kabeljous in our own water. If Frick were given a scare he might tell, but he is selling things to the troops. My father knows him. Come, uncle. The game is up. Tell me what you know. Nothing will happen. Why are you crying? I am not going to shoot you.’

‘Hurt me? How could ye? — How?’ Allen recovered himself in English. ‘I can tell ye nothing, but — why should I feel hurt? We’ve earned it fairly. Only — only let me alone, child. Mind the step there, and don’t hurt my roses.’

The newly created staff of the Despatch pranced joyously outside the press-room’s sealed door till such time as Captain Ritson, of the Intelligence Department, should enter upon his search.

They counted sixty-seven pitched battles among the three of them and skirmishes innumerable. It was their business to run without ceasing from strife to strife at a rumour, in constant peril of death, imprisonment, disease, — and the wrath of criticised Brigadiers; seeing all things, foreseeing all things, fording all things, riding all things, proving all things, holding fast to the Wire.

Three continents waited on their words for the truth; and in their hands lay the reputation of every combatant officer. But they took it lightly—from the snubbings of the excited Aide-de-Camp, who does not understand how a newspaperman can be a human being, to the high-pitched blasphemies of a semi-delirious General trying to curse his command out of a trap into which, against all warning, he proudly marches in close order. Refreshed after sleep on a real bed, and meals at a table, they were saying what they thought of the campaign in language no Press Censor would have countersigned.

‘And, by the way, I’ve done a bully leader for today,’ said Corbett. “Tisn’t often an American can lay down the law to a British annexation. Let it go in, Vincent. It’s your war, but it’s my fun.’

‘Never!’ Grady struck an attitude. ‘We don’t conquer States for the Transatlantic Syndicate to slop over.’

‘Did you do a leader, then?’ Vincent asked pointedly. ‘Me? Are you mad or drunk? I went to bed — between sheets — at nine last night,’ the fat Grady replied. ‘Then Corbett gets it. I swear I’m not going to do leaders. They’ve given me about ten columns of camp and brigade orders. I rely on those. Mustn’t spoil the public too early.’

‘There’s my friend from Blackwood’s.’ Corbett spied Allen at the head of his little band of compositors coming round the corner.

‘See here, Mr. Allen, I’ve a most important leader I want you to set up at once. I’m sorry it’s written in pencil, but — ‘Mornin’, Ritson.’ The officer of the Intelligence Department cantered up. ‘Break in Daubeny’s seals and let’s get to work. We want today’s paper to be a beauty.’

‘All right. I’ll do the searching in half an hour, and then you can go on.’ Ritson of the Intelligence passed into Dessauer’s office with Grady and Corbett. Allen, in the unswept press-room, looked forlorn and very old. Vincent, quick to notice, gave him a most human ‘Good morning!’

‘Thank ye. What’ll they be lookin’ for there?’ ‘Oh, documents of sorts,’ Vincent answered. ‘I — I think I could show you one, maybe,’ he whispered by the hand-press under Bergmann’s picture. ‘Which one d’you mean?’ said Vincent quickly. ‘A — well, it’s not in English.’ He had lain awake all night in a chair thinking his way to this end. Gert and the others were scrubbing yesterday’s type before releasing it. ‘It’s here.’ His face worked with an agony hidden from the other.

‘I see. Thank you.’

‘No thanks to me. I’m a burgher of the Free State — I’ve worked here since ‘Seventy-five, but I’m not tryin’ — I’m not tryin’ to justify myself — only it’s all wrong — to me.’

He hung with half-opened mouth on Vincent’s next action. Would the man jingle sovereigns at him as the Colonial had done?

Vincent stepped into the editorial room, where the Intelligence officer was examining Dessauer’s old bills, and gave him the news.

‘He seems rather a decent old chap. I daresay you could make something out of him. He’s horribly scared of something.’

‘Thanks,’ said Captain Ritson. ‘I expected this. I’ll settle it at once.’

He rose, walked down the composing-room to where Allen, surrounded by Gert and the others, dealt copy of Corbett’s leader under a running fire of instructions from the American.

‘Why, I’d ha’ died,’ said Corbett delightedly, ‘sooner than let an Englishman write the first leader of a commandeered Cuba paper. The way you English miss your chances is stupefying! Are you through yet, Ritson?’

‘I hear,’ said Ritson, looking directly at Allen, that you can tell us where there is a copy of the proclamation in Basuto which was set up in this office. You will give it to me at once.’ Allen turned towards Vincent like a hunted dog. This was ten thousand times worse than any offer of money. Gert, Mrs. Bergmann’s pet employee, stood within arm’s reach of him; the others, his subordinates, even closer. One cannot deny a quarter of a century of habit, use, and dear custom easily — in a loud voice before one’s yoke-fellows.

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In less time than the lifting of an eyebrow, Grady and Corbett, trained to the mastery of situations, had comprehended this last — the pity, the horror, and the loneliness of it. Moreover, Corbett had caught a sidelight in Gert’s eye which did not promise well for the old man. Ritson, clean-shaven and precise under his Staff cap, waited for the answer.

‘What are ye talkin’ about?’ said Allen, running a dry tongue over a drier lip. The merciless sun hit full on his face.

‘It’s no use trying to lie. I mean the Basuto proclamation.’

‘Look here, Ritson,’ said Corbett. ‘We don’t mind your searching the whole office, but we do object to your searching our men when we’re trying to make their work. Mister Gert — happy to meet you again. Mister Gert! —looks rather guilty. Besides he’s not a good comp. Take him into the machinery-room and shoot him. Run along, Gert.’

The face of the black-nailed Dutchman turned a cheerful grey-green. He was as ignorant of the etiquette of a conquering army — as that army itself.

‘Of course, he doesn’t know,’ said Vincent. ‘If Dessauer had any sense he’d have taken it with him.

How’s your leader coming on, Mr. Allen?’

‘I’ve just sorted it, sir. We’ll have it set in twenty minutes — if —if I may go on with my work.’ The yellow-veined hand on the justifying-table shook. Bergmann from the wall above the door seemed to be enjoying his woe.

‘Look out for Gert!’ said Grady to Ritson. ‘He’s edging off. A thorough quick search is the only thing, now that they’ve got the alarm. We’ll all help.’ He flung open the doors of a hanging cupboard with a crash, and broke up the little crowd.

‘That’s it,’ said Corbett. ‘Come here, Gert, with me. We’ll investigate the composing-room. Don’t be afraid. You shan’t be shot till you’ve set up my leader.’

Grady, telegraphed to by Corbett, tucked two compositors under his wing, and motioned other two to follow Ritson. Vincent called Allen by eye.

“Fore God,’ said the old man, trembling from head to foot and backing into the machinery-room. ‘How could — how was I to up an’ tell him there before them all? They were my subordinates! Could ye expect me to? He didn’t know what it meant.’

‘Hsh ! It’s all right,’ said Vincent tenderly. Then raising his voice: ‘Mr. Allen, what have we in hand of old matter?’ The others, shepherded by Grady, passed into the composing-room. ‘Get it now,’ said Vincent. Allen motioned to an old file of mixed job and proof-slips in a case-cabinet on the floor-level of the machinery and fouled with dust. ‘The fourth from the bottom, I think,’ he whispered. ‘Ye’ll no mind if—if I sit down for a minute…. I’ve no wish to curry favour — but you needn’t believe that.’

The proof was found, slipped off, and into Vincent’s pocket, and the file kicked back out of sight. Allen sat heavily on the wreck of a bottomless chair, and drummed on the arms with his knuckles.

‘Ye — ye did not use the natives fra’ Injia against us. . . . How could I up an’ tell him there before Gert? … I’m — I’m not as young as I was an’ . . . there’s a power o’ thinkin’ involved … after twenty-five years…. But by all the rules, it’s perfectly damnable. Ye’ll admit that, sir?’

Vincent could not quite see the drift of the last remark, but echoed it at a venture. ‘Don’t think about it. We’ll go on with today’s make-up.’

They entered the composing-room together.

‘I can’t find anything,’ said Ritson, and Allen winced at the voice.

Half an hour later the staff’ of the Bloemfontein Despatch fell to work in Dessauer’s office with much laughter and more zeal.

‘Did Ritson get it after all?’ said Grady of a sudden. ‘He did,’ said Vincent, and told the tale from beginning to end.

‘Fellow-citizens!’ Corbett rose ponderously in his place. ‘I wish to say something right here. I love you all — God bless you! But I want to point out that for comprehensive, consistent, glass-eyed, bottle-bellied, frozen-headed folly, you English beat all God’s suffering earth! Vincent is the King’s Fool — the Imperial Ass. He has a scoop under his hand which — which — why, there isn’t an adjective in the English language—’

‘”Our glorious common heritage”‘; don’t forget that, old man,’ Vincent chuckled.

‘Yes, but you’re the asses who graze on that common! I won’t try to describe Vincent’s scoop. Suffice it to say, as Grady always cables, he chucks that scoop away. Not with both hands merely, but with his teeth and his toe-nails, and the sweat of his brow, he climbs kopjes to thrust the scoop into the hands of the most effete, paralytic, and bung-eyed Government the century has produced! And what will that Government do with it? It will say: “Here is another link in the chain of evidence!” Then it will take and bury that proclamation in a sarcophagus lest anybody should accidentally find it out. It’ll get up in the middle of the night and dig one out of solid granite with its own thick head. That proclamation should have been facsimiled in every paper in the universe. No! Your Government will put it away in a Blue Book, which will come out a year or two after Steyn is a virtuous Amsterdammer or — yes, I accept the amendment, Grady — we’re as big fools as you are almost — a citizen of Hoboken. Nobody will read it. Nobody will know about it, and then the English will wonder why they’re misunderstood! Hullo! Come in !’

‘I’ve a darned good mind to distribute your leader,’ said Vincent. ‘But you’re quite right, Corbett. We are the biggest fools unhung. What is it, Mr. Allen?’

‘I wanted to let you gentlemen understand that I did — what I did just now as an individual. It’s o’ no earthly importance to anyone but myself — anything connected wi’ me. I know that. But ye’ll understand … I’m not for takin’ any oath of allegiance, or sayin’ I’m glad to see you here, or hangin’ out a Union Jack, or any o’ that—like.’

Grady’s eyebrows drew together — the vision of poor Hawke bleeding from the volley under the white flag was always with him. He would have spoken, but Vincent raised his hand. Allen clung to the edge of the thin plank door.

‘Tak’ it or leave it, as you will. God judge me, if He’s not forgotten us — We deserve it…. But I did it as a Burgher of the Free State!’

THE Boers had wrecked the three centre spans and blown huge pieces out of the stone piers. The wreckage lay adrift in the dirty water, and a section of the British Army was now picking up the pieces. A pontoon bridge had been thrown across the river. You reached it by way of a steep sandy track through the scrub; and on the north bank met a steeper, sandier scarp that climbed out past the haunches of the bridge under the edge of a rocky embankment. Till the temporary railway-trestle was finished, this plunge and that scramble were the only path into the Orange Free State. Hither came McManus, head of the Corporate Equatorial Bank of South Africa, on urgent business. He had been summoned to Bloemfontein by the Field-Marshal Commanding-in-Chief, who, with the High Commissioner, was then striving to disentangle some finances which President Steyn had dropped. In his inner pocket lay a pass calling on all officers, civil and military, to assist and expedite R. L. McManus, Esq., by every means in their power; for the State had need of him. And his time — which meant other people’s money as well as his own — was valuable.

McManus was not used to passes. As a rule of thirty years, few people interfered with his uprisings or downsittings. He was known to remotest Dutch farmers as an institution representing an institution, from the edge of the Kalahari desert to the outskirts of Portuguese territory — from Salisbury, where they lend money on mortgage, to the Cape Flats, where they foreclose on villa property. His grizzled head held most intimate knowledge of South Africa’s finances for the last quarter of a century; and his word, when they importuned him to speak, was law alike to speculative Bond or Progressive Ministries. Cape Town knew that he had been called up to Bloemfontein and flashed the news to Natal and Kimberley; nor need we for an instant doubt that Pretoria knew it within twelve hours of his departure from the coast. The Corporate Equatorial had been chased out of Bloemfontein with bad words early in the war. Its return signified more than an army corps victorious.

McManus, his Secretary, and half-a-dozen fellow-travellers came in a desolate evening to the southern end of Folly Bridge. A simple race of God-fearing herdsmen had been there before them. The platform, after three days’ vehement cleansing, still reeked of putrid onions, stable litter, and the remnants of bloody sheepskins. They had defiled the corners of every room they had lived in, as dirty little boys defile abandoned houses. They had removed everything save the door-locks, and had left in exchange a portrait in crayon on the wall of one ‘Chamerlain at Modder’, which represented an eye-glassed person dangling at a rope’s end.

‘My word! ‘said a New Zealand doctor, hoping to join his countrymen in the big camps to the North, ‘this is a lovely land to fight over! When do you suppose we go on to Bloemfontein?’

‘I’d give something to know why McManus is going up,’ said the Captain of a troop of Colonial Horse, returning from a Karoo hospital.

‘Who’s McManus?’ said the New Zealander.

‘Good Lord!’ the South African replied, aghast at his ignorance. ‘He’s McManus. He’s in the carriage now. You’ll see he won’t get out. He’s got all his skoff with him. He’ll have a decent dinner — soda-water too.’

The Colonial had been picked up out of the tangled Colesberg kopjes, where soda-water was scarce.

‘I’m going up with the Little Man’s private letters.’ This was an officer late of the Bengal Army.’ That ought to be good for a reserved compartment in a cattle-truck. Wonder how long we’ll have to wait.’ He stumbled forth, grasping the Commander-in-Chief’s private mail-bag. The noises of a full camp filled their ears, but the station was void and black.

‘There must be a Railway Staff Officer somewhere,’ a young and brisk Gunner murmured.’ Let’s find him. Isn’t that a light at the end of the platform? Phew! How the place stinks! ‘

They formed an untidy little procession, and, falling over sleeping men and stray baggage, found at last a bare room, lighted with three candles in beer-bottles, and somewhat over-furnished with two men, both in khaki—one of them very angry.

‘But — but — confound it all,’ said the latter. ‘How did it come to be broached, Guard?’

‘I don’t know, sir. My business is to report it to you. One case of whisky with the top smashed in, and a bottle gone between here an’ Arundel. They’re always doin’ it along the line, sir. I think it’s those dam’ Irregular Corps.’

Yes, that’s all very fine, but how did it come to be broached? Well, never mind — never mind. I shall report it, of course.’

‘Report it!’ whispered a Sapper, with documents for the Intelligence Department. ‘They’ve been looting the Staff’s Reserve baggage down the line. A lot they’ll care for one bottle o’ whisky missing.’

‘What can I do for you, gentlemen,’ said the Railway Staff Officer, when the train Guard had withdrawn.

‘We want to know how we can get on to Bloemfontein.’

‘Not another train till to-morrow night. You’ll have to wait till then.’ The R.S.O. drummed merrily on the table.

It meant a check of twenty-four hours, and someone said so.

‘It isn’t my fault,’ said the R.S.O. I assure you it would give me the greatest pleasure personally to shoot rubbish up the line, but I have my orders; and I’ve nothing more to do with it. I’ve noticed that every man who comes up thinks his business is the one thing I’ve got to attend to, and that the whole Army will go to pieces if he isn’t sent to the Front at once, but — Hullo! What do these Kaffirs want? Been out of the camp without a pass?’

Four Kaffirs were thrust into the room, and the company departed, leaving the R.S.O. to execute justice according to his own lights and those in the beer-bottles.

‘My word’ said the New Zealander. ‘But we didn’t make a fuss about not going up, did we Why was he so stuffy? Who is that man?’

‘He has been here precisely nine days,’ said a dry voice in the darkness. ‘Nine whole days in Africa. He has his orders. We’ll hear a lot about those orders before we leave. Now let’s see if we can whack up something to eat.’

‘Get a light first,’ said the Gunner. ‘If we could find some oil, we’d light the lamps in our carriage. Morgan, go an’ unscrew the lamps an’ bring ’em out here. I’ll look for oil. Hi.’ (This to a shadow that passed). ‘Where do you keep your lamp-oil?’

‘In the lamp-room, of course. I’m the Station-master,’ was the fretful reply.

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‘I beg your pardon. You must be awfully hard-worked. Don’t bother. We’ll get it.’

‘Thank you, sir. Yes, we’re working twenty hours a day. There’s the oil. I’ll strike a match, and you can get the cork out of — ‘ ‘No, you won’t! Chuck that match away. I’d sooner waste your oil than set myself alight, Morgan. Bring the lamps here. I’ll fill ’em.’

‘One of the lamps ain’t empty at all.’ Morgan’s voice came across the siding with a rising snarl. ‘It’s full. It’s trickling all down my cuff.’

‘Never mind. Bring what’s left. We must see to eat.’

The lamps were filled and lit rough-handedly; and plate by plate, and tin by tin, with jack-knives for tin-openers, a meal was dragged together.

The Railway Staff Officer suggested that it should be eaten in his room, and there enlarged on the duties and responsibilities of his office. But the company were tired. Moreover, R.S.O.’s were old birds to them. They knew not fewer than eighty of the breed, and some had been R.S.O.s themselves.

‘I think,’ said the New Zealand doctor, skewering cold tinned herring on a pocket-knife, ‘before I talked about shooting rubbish up the line, I’d try to burn a little of the muck that’s lying about the station. Sweeping isn’t any earthly good.’

‘Oh, that department is probably in charge of the Officer Commanding the Royal Engine-eahs,’ said the Colonial Captain, with a short dry laugh. He had served since the outbreak of the war, and counted thirteen engagements to his credit.

‘A little of the lamp-oil we wasted and a match would do wonders,’ the New Zealander insisted.

‘Don’t presume to dictate to the Army,’ an Imperial Officer said, proudly. ‘I’ll back an R.S.O. against anyone except’ — he looked across the table — ‘a Sapper.’

‘We’re learning. I swear we are learning.’ The young Engineer flushed. ‘We aren’t such fools as we were. The Colonials have taught us a lot. Take that Railway Pioneer Corps that’s laying down the new line on the north bank, for instance.’

‘Yes,’ the Colonial Captain grunted. ‘They’re the pick of the Rand — all mine-managers and machinists and engineers and boiler-makers. They’re working double shifts to finish the track, because they want to get home to Johannesburg. Yes, I know about them.’ Again he laughed unpleasantly.

‘What?’ the New Zealander asked.

‘Oh, the usual thing. They worked day and night, and, of course, they wanted more than Service rations, so their commandant, Phil Tenbroek — he’s a big mine-manager when he’s at home — bought a lot of Bovril and pea-meal, and made soup of it, and served it out to ’em at night. You can see their flare-lamps across the river now, if you look. Day and night they work. Well, the authorities found he’d spent five whole pounds Government money, and they told him he wasn’t to do it. Mind you, that’s now — now — now — when every day — what am I talking of? — every hour’s work means several thousands of pounds saved. Yes, they told him the expenditure was unauthorised.’

‘And then?’ said the young Sapper uneasily.

‘Oh, then. You know Phil Tenbroek. At least I do. Phil sent a wire to Port Elizabeth on his own hook for fifty pounds’ worth of Bovril and pea-meal. He paid out of his pocket, of course; but Philly wants to get back to the Rand as soon as possible, and, it seemed to him the sooner the new line was laid the better. And they’d have crippled the whole Corps — the best engineers in the world — for a fiver! Nice tale, isn’t it? True, too. Look at their flare-lamps! They work.’

Far away across the dark to the northward of the formless country ran a line of fire-dots. The Railway Pioneer Corps were at work on the new track that was to connect with the temporary trestle-bridge. A dull boom came up the gorge between the kopjes.

Blasting away the wreckage,’ the Colonial explained. ‘Risky work at night, but Phil told ’em he was in a hurry. Oh, Philly Tenbroek is a man. I bet he hasn’t taken off his clothes for a week.’

Morning, hot and sultry, put out the flare-lamps on the north of the river, and brought in a train-load of troops from the South to be added to the acres of dusty tentage around Folly Bridge. The travellers, including McManus, had seen men and guns and buck-wagons, doctors, dust and wounded — stony hills and scrub-strewn downs — a few hundred times before. It pleased them better to observe the R.S.O. as he faced the tenth day of his official life. The four Kaffirs had been disposed of, but he was still troubled about the broached whisky, and much annoyed by the eccentricities of lunatic civilians, who, solely for the jest of it, wished to know when they could get goods up to Bloemfontein. The big railway junction thirty miles behind him was also a nuisance. It complained of a congested goods-yard, and desired him to take trucks. Now, his desire was to keep his end of the line neat and open, and, so far, he had succeeded. He drew attention with pride to the long empty sidings, which he had ‘saved,’ though he did not exactly specify the purpose of his economies. There were far too many people, he said, anxious to go to Bloemfontein. Officers, of course, if their passes were in perfect order, might be allowed; but these idle civilians, he was free to say, annoyed him. They simply had no conception of military matters, and they never seemed to think a man had orders. However, he had his orders, and he meant to carry them out. What otherwise was the sense of orders? He paused very often for a reply. The station in the warm, close air stank to heaven.

‘Well, that’s all right,’ said the New Zealander, ‘but when I was quite finished with my orders, it seems to me I’d have another shot at the rubbish about here. My word! Look at all that unemployed labour in the camp! ‘

There were not fewer than two thousand men under the dusty hills. Some of them were being drilled.

McManus went for a walk through the mimosa bushes to look at the late bridge. It had cost a hundred thousand pounds, and somebody would have to account for the breakage. That, indirectly, was McManus’s department.

‘Have you seen McManus?’ cried a private of the Railway Pioneer Corps, as he rode up to the Colonial Captain sitting in the window of what had been Folly Bridge refreshment-room. ‘I’ve seen him. He looks as if he’d just come out of Adderley Street.’

‘Did you speak to him?’

‘No, but I wanted to ask him who he expects is going to pay for the bridge.’

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‘You will — on the Rand — after the war,’ the Captain drawled.

‘That’s what I supposed, but I wish to goodness McManus could work out some scheme of compensation that ‘ud hit the Transvaal hard.’

‘So do I — but the war expenses will have to be paid by the Rand just the same.’

‘That’s rather hard on us — working as volunteers to mend what the Boers have broken, and then to have the bill sent in to us at the end. McManus lent me two thousand once on stands I had in Johannesburg. I paid him before the war. Wish I hadn’t now. Well, I must go on. S’long.’

At four in the afternoon, a train was made up at Folly Bridge. Into this marched the passengers and their baggage, and at that hour appeared the R.S.O. to satisfy himself that all passes were in order and to issue a ukase.

‘You will be turned back at the other side of the river by the R.S.O. there if your passes are not countersigned by the Station Commandant here,’ he said, smiling.

‘The deuce! When was that order issued?’ the Colonial Captain demanded.

‘It isn’t my fault. I’ve only got my orders, and —’ ‘Yes, yes, we know all that, but where is the Station Commandant?’

‘I don’t know. He was about here this morning, but he left after lunch.’

‘No, you wouldn’t,’ reflectively from a corner of the carriage.

‘Well, I hope you’ll get across all right, but I tell you now that unless your passes are countersigned by Smith, Station Commandant, you won’t be able to get across even if you were Kitchener himself.’

‘I’d give a month — I’d give three months’ pay to have K. on this platform now — and we’d see,’ said the officer with the Little Man’s letters.

‘I’m only giving you my orders —’

‘And you don’t know where Smith is?’

‘No.’

‘And you expect us to hunt him all around the camp, do you? We’ve been seventeen—twenty-two—hours on this blasted onion-heap, and you and Smith between you have only just discovered —’

‘Well, it isn’t my fault, I’m only —’

‘You ought to keep Smith on the premises then.’

‘That has nothing to do with me. I should recommend you to go out and look for him.’

‘Oh, I’ve no interest in the matter. I’m only going up with the Little Man’s private mail. Here’s the bag. I don’t care. If I’m stopped on the other side, it’s your look-out. I’m sure the Little Man would be quite pleased.’

‘Oh, there’s McManus,’ said the Colonial Captain, looking out of the window. ‘I suppose he’s hunting Smith. D’you think they’ll stop McManus if his pass isn’t countersigned by Smith?’

‘Who’s McManus?’ A giggle of deep delight interrupted the R.S.O. ‘Oh, that civilian! ‘Pon my word, you’d think Bloemfontein was Piccadilly. They’re all wanting to go up there.’

‘Thank you,’ said the Colonial. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to be turned back on the other side. Perhaps if we say we couldn’t find Smith they’ll forgive us.’

‘Well, I’m only giving you my word —’

The train rolled out nearly half a mile and halted in a deep cutting. The passengers stepped out over-ankles into the sand that slid under their feet, and their baggage followed them. A gaggle of Kaffirs marched away with bags and bedding-rolls, and the company followed depressedly. They expected to be met on the other side by a train from the North, which in God’s good time would go back to Bloemfontein.

‘But—but what do they want to stop in the middle of a cutting for?’ said the New Zealander. ‘I wouldn’t have minded walking a hundred yards on the level back there. They might have made a decent platform. I believe I’ve twisted my ankle climbing up the bank.’

‘Oh, this isn’t a patch to what it is on t’other side,’ said an officer on the bridge works. And they walked and they walked till they reached the pontoon, a hundred feet below. McManus’s face seemed a little set as it were — set, but in no wise greatly troubled.

‘Did McManus find Smith?’ said the Colonial, as they climbed the desperate north bank down which buck-wagons were sliding in billows of dust. Here again fifty men’s labour for two days would have greatly smoothed the road.

‘He said he didn’t,’ his companion replied.

‘Glory!’ said the Colonial, and, hopping over a boulder, fell into a bush. A hundred feet of river-bank through deep sand at the end of a mile walk is not easy to cover ; and it was a dewy-browed detachment that broke through the scrub and landed, panting, among the rocks at the gangers’ hut on the north side of the bridge. But the R.S.O. who received them there was cool and utterly calm. He wished to know whether their passes were in order, and a delicious awe fell on the company.

McManus climbed the slope into the Orange Free State easily and dispassionately, his lower jaw protruding, perhaps, one-sixteenth of an inch beyond its normal clinch. The travellers made a little semicircle about the R.S.O.—the R.S.O. of the North Bank of Folly Bridge- about him and about McManus, of the Corporate Equatorial Bank. It was heavenly weather. There was no accommodation of any sort of description, for the gangers’ hut was occupied by military telegraphers.

‘May I trouble you for your pass, please?’

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McManus produced it clumsily. He was more accustomed to demand than to supply documents of identification.

‘Yes — yes — this seems all right’— the company winked as with one eyelid —’ but I don’t see that it has been countersigned by Smith.’

‘Captain Smith was in his bath, when I went to him at Folly Bridge at three forty-five. He sent a verbal message that it would be all right — so far as I understood through the door at the time.’

‘I am afraid I can’t help that.’ The R.S.O. paused uneasily. McManus in grey tweeds, black bowler, and immaculate white collar, gave him not the slightest help.

‘This pass is no good.’ The sentence came out in a rush.

‘Indeed?’ There was a meekness about McManus and a silence on the little knot of bystanders that would have warned any other than an imported Imperial alien that that kopje was occupied in force.

‘No. You’ll have to go back across the river to get Smith’s signature. I can’t let you up on that pass.’ This very cheerfully.

Whole hierarchies had signed it. Lions and unicorns ramped on the top of it. It appealed, as has been said, to earth, fire, and water — to horseflesh, steam, and steel, and all in command thereof, to forward with speed and courtesy R. L. McManus to Bloemfontein; but it lacked the signature of Smith — that Smith who was then towelling himself two miles away.

‘I must go back?’ McManus’s clear eye travelled down the rocky slope behind him to the far pontoon and the further south bank, where a few soldiery, pink as prawns, and at that distance not much larger, were bathing; climbed the wooded bank beyond, and rested with disfavour on the domino-small houses of Folly Bridge.

‘Yes—go back, of course, and get Smith to sign it.’

A lesser man would have said: ‘I’ll see you damned first,’ but McManus was in no sense small. His face did not even flush. He turned away slowly, as though the matter had no further interest, and the R.S.O. dealt with the other passes. To be precise, not one carried the magic signature of Smith. The officer in charge of the Little Man’s private mail almost implored the R.S.O. to stop him for twenty-four hours because he wished to learn whether there was any truth in the current Army legend that under no circumstances would the Little Man swear. The officer in charge of the Staff’s mail followed suit. He had two bags of official correspondence for the Staff, and there were Generals among them who could swear. He, too, prayed to be turned back. The officer with the new maps for the Intelligence Department joined in his entreaties.

‘After all,’ said one cheerily, as they sat down on their bedding- rolls in the gathering dusk, ‘what does it matter, old man? You’re bound to be Stellenbosched in three days.’

Now Stellenbosch is not a name to use lightly, for there go the men who have not done quite so well; and the R.S.O.’s face clouded as he asked for an explanation.

‘Haven’t you stopped McManus?’ said an officer, who knew his man.

‘Who’s McManus?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry — never mind — you’ll find out before Tuesday.’

‘The only person I’ve stopped was that civilian who hadn’t had his pass signed by Smith. I can’t accept a verbal message across the Orange River.’

‘Quite right. You’ll be getting all your message on the wire from Bloemfontein in a little while. I wouldn’t be in your shoes for a trifle.’

‘I don’t think McManus minds much, though,’ the Colonial Captain struck in soothingly. ‘I spoke to him just now. He says he is going on.’

‘I’ll take dashed good care he doesn’t,’ said the R.S.O., exploding. This was something he could understand.

‘Yes — he’s going on in the train when she comes in — so you’ll have another chance, you see. If you stop him, I suppose he will go back to Cape Town, and he’ll tell the Little Man why. He’s rather busy, and he won’t be able to come up again.’

‘But — confound it all — does he expect the whole blessed Orange Free State to wait on his business?’

‘It would be a bad job if it didn’t — just now. He’s the head of the Corporate Equatorial Banking Corporation, and he has been called up to Bloemfontein rather urgently to put the finances of the place straight. He isn’t going up to start a hotel there, you know.’

Somebody lit a pipe; and in the hush you could hear the great river running through the dry hills. A far-away voice on the construction- engine backed close up to the bridge called to someone under a staging.

‘McManus going up to Bloemfontein to-night?’

‘Ye—es.’

‘That means business — thank God.’

‘Why—y?’

‘Why?’Cause they don’t care one scarlet weir for the whole Army — the Boers don’t. They reckon they can get them withdrawn if they win the game in London, but reopenin’ the Bank at Bloemfontein means business. That’s why. It teaches the Dutch more than twenty battles. Wonder they don’t try to cut the line and nab him to-night.’

The silence by the gangers’ hut continued unbroken for twenty puffs.

‘And he did wait outside Smith’s door, while Smith was washing — because I saw him. I wouldn’t have done it,’ said an Imperial Officer slowly,’ but I suppose he wished to see what sort of fools we can be when we go in for war.’

‘And you’ve told him to walk two miles back and two miles here again,’ said the New Zealander, ‘to get Smith’s signature.’

‘And there’s no guarantee Smith won’t be having a hair-cut and shampoo when he reaches there,’ the Colonial Captain added. We knew in Cape Town a week ago that McManus had been called up. But, of course, if he hasn’t got Smith’s signature, that settles it.’

‘What does it matter? Let the brute frolic round the kopjes till Smith’s dry. He’s only the boss of the biggest Bank in the country. Who cares how much they want him at Bloemfontein ? I’d put a guard on him, and march him back in irons, by Jove,’ said a Cavalry Officer. ‘I say, old man, didn’t it ever occur to you to knock off some of the points of these rocks that we’re supposed to sit on? They’re infernally nubbly.’

One by one the stars came out over the hills, and the flare-lamps of the never-sleeping Pioneer Corps puffed and blazed afresh in the river-bed.

Last of all came the train from the North, and when McManus and his Secretary went up to their labelled compartments reserved for them at Bloemfontein, the R.S.O. took no notice.

No more, for that matter, did McManus.

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THE day that I chose to visit H.M.S. Peridot in Simon’s Bay was the day that the Admiral had chosen to send her up the coast. She was just steaming out to sea as my train came in, and since the rest of the Fleet were either coaling or busy at the rifle-ranges a thousand feet up the hill, I found myself stranded, lunchless, on the sea-front with no hope of return to Cape Town before 5 p.m. At this crisis I had the luck to come across my friend Inspector Hooper, Cape Government Railways, in command of an engine and a brake-van chalked for repair.‘If you get something to eat,’ he said, ‘I’ll run you down to Glengaritf siding till the goods comes along. It’s cooler there than here, you see.’

I got food and drink from the Greeks who sell all things at a price, and the engine trotted us a couple of miles up the line to a bay of drifted sand and a plank-platform half buried in sand not a hundred yards from the edge of the surf. Moulded dunes, whiter than any snow, rolled far inland up a brown and purple valley of splintered rocks and dry scrub. A crowd of Malays hauled at a net beside two blue and green boats on the beach; a picnic party danced and shouted barefoot where a tiny river trickled across the flat, and a circle of dry hills, whose feet were set in sands of silver, locked us in against a seven-coloured sea. At either horn of the bay the railway line, cut just above highwater mark, ran round a shoulder of piled rocks, and disappeared.

‘You see, there’s always a breeze here,’ said Hooper, opening the door as the engine left us in the siding on the sand, and the strong south-easter buffeting under Elsie’s Peak dusted sand into our tickey beer. Presently he sat down to a file full of spiked documents. He had returned from a long trip up-country, where he had been reporting on damaged rolling-stock, as far away as Rhodesia. The weight of the bland wind on my eyelids; the song of it under the car-roof, and high up among the rocks; the drift of fine grains chasing each other musically ashore; the tramp of the surf; the voices of the picnickers; the rustle of Hooper’s file, and the presence of the assured sun, joined with the beer to cast me into magical slumber. The hills of False Bay were just dissolving into those of fairyland when I heard footsteps on the sand outside, and the clink of our couplings.

‘Stop that!’ snapped Hooper, without raising his head from his work. ‘It’s those dirty little Malay boys, you see: they’re always playing with the trucks . . . .’

‘Don’t be hard on ’em. The railway’s a general refuge in Africa,’ I replied.

‘’Tis—up-country at any rate. That reminds me,’ he felt in his waistcoat-pocket, ‘I’ve got a curiosity for you from Wankies—beyond Bulawayo. It’s more of a souvenir perhaps than——’

‘The old hotel’s inhabited,’ cried a voice. ‘White men, from the language. Marines to the front! Come on, Pritch. Here’s your Belmont. Wha—i—i!’

The last word dragged like a rope as Mr. Pyecroft ran round to the open door, and stood looking up into my face. Behind him an enormous Sergeant of Marines trailed a stalk of dried seaweed, and dusted the sand nervously from his fingers.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘I thought the Hierophant was down the coast?’

‘We came in last Tuesday—from Tristan d’Acunha—for overhaul, and we shall be in dockyard ’ands for two months, with boiler-seatings.’

‘Come and sit down.’ Hooper put away the file.

‘This is Mr. Hooper of the Railway,’ I explained, as Pyecroft turned to haul up the black-moustached sergeant.

‘This is Sergeant Pritchard, of the Agaric, an old shipmate,’ said he. ‘We were strollin’ on the beach.’ The monster blushed and nodded. He filled up one side of the van when he sat down.

‘And this is my friend, Mr. Pyecroft,’ I added to Hooper, already busy with the extra beer which my prophetic soul had bought from the Greeks.

‘Moi aussi,’ quoth Pyecroft, and drew out beneath his coat a labelled quart bottle.

‘Why, it’s Bass!’ cried Hooper.

‘It was Pritchard,’ said Pyecroft. ‘They can’t resist him.’

‘That’s not so,’ said Pritchard mildly.

‘Not verbatim per’aps, but the look in the eye came to the same thing.’

‘Where was it?’ I demanded.

‘Just on beyond here—at Kalk Bay. She was slappin’ a rug in a back verandah. Pritch ’adn’t more than brought his batteries to bear, before she stepped indoors an’ sent it flyin’ over the wall.’

Pyecroft patted the warm bottle.

‘It was all a mistake,’ said Pritchard. ‘I shouldn’t wonder if she mistook me for Maclean. We’re about of a size.’

I had heard householders of Muizenberg, St. James, and Kalk Bay complain of the difficulty of keeping beer or good servants at the seaside, and I began to see the reason. None the less, it was excellent Bass, and I too drank to the health of that large-minded maid.

‘It’s the uniform that fetches ’em, an’ they fetch it,’ said Pyecroft. ‘My simple navy blue is respectable, but not fascinatin’. Now Pritch in ’is Number One rig is always “purr Mary, on the terrace”—ex officio as you might say.’

‘She took me for Maclean, I tell you,’ Pritchard insisted. ‘Why—why—to listen to him you wouldn’t think that only yesterday——’

‘Pritch,’ said Pyecroft, ‘be warned in time. If we begin tellin’ what we know about each other we’ll be turned out of the pub. Not to mention aggravated desertion on several occasions——’

‘Never anything more than absence without leaf—I defy you to prove it,’ said the Sergeant hotly. ‘An’ if it comes to that, how about Vancouver in ’87?’

‘How about it? Who pulled bow in the gig going ashore? Who told Boy Niven . . .?’

‘Surely you were court-martialled for that?’ I said. The story of Boy Niven who lured seven or eight able-bodied seamen and marines into the woods of British Columbia used to be a legend of the Fleet.

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‘Yes, we were court-martialled to rights,’ said Pritchard, ‘but we should have been tried for murder if Boy Niven ’adn’t been unusually tough. He told us he had an uncle ’oo’d give us land to farm. ’E said he was born at the back o’ Vancouver Island, and all the time the beggar was a balmy Barnado Orphan!’

‘But we believed him, said Pyecroft. ‘I did—you did—Paterson did—an’ ’oo was the Marine that married the cocoanut-woman afterwards—him with the mouth?’

‘Oh, Jones, Spit-Kid Jones. I ’aven’t thought of ’im in years,’ said Pritchard. ‘Yes, Spit-Kid believed it, an’ George Anstey and Moon. We were very young an’ very curious.’

‘But lovin’ an’ trustful to a degree,’ said Pyecroft.

‘’Remember when ’e told us to walk in single file for fear o’ bears? ’Remember, Pye, when ’e ’opped about in that bog full o’ ferns an’ sniffed an’ said ’e could smell the smoke of ’is uncle’s farm ? An’ all the time it was a dirty little outlyin’ uninhabited island. We walked round it in a day, an’ come back to our boat lyin’ on the beach. A whole day Boy Niven kept us walkin’ in circles lookin’ for ’is uncle’s farm! He said his uncle was compelled by the law of the land to give us a farm!’

‘Don’t get hot, Pritch. We believed,’ said Pyecroft.

‘He’d been readin’ books. He only did it to get a run ashore an’ have himself talked of. A day an’ a night—eight of us—followin’ Boy Niven round an uninhabited island in the Vancouver archipelago! Then the picket came for us an’ a nice pack o’ idiots we looked!’

‘What did you get for it?’ Hooper asked.

‘Heavy thunder with continuous lightning for two hours. Thereafter sleet-squalls, a confused sea, and cold, unfriendly weather till conclusion o’cruise,’ said Pyecroft. ‘It was only what we expected, but what we felt—an’ I assure you, Mr. Hooper, even a sailor-man has a heart to break—was bein’ told that we able seamen an’ promisin’ marines ’ad misled Boy Niven. Yes, we poor back-to-the-landers was supposed to ’ave misled him! He rounded on us, o’ course, an’ got off easy.’

‘Excep’ for what we gave him in the steerin’-flat when we came out o’ cells. ’Eard anything of ’im lately, Pye?’

‘Signal Boatswain in the Channel Fleet, I believe—Mr. L. L. Niven is.’

‘An’ Anstey died o’ fever in Benin,’ Pritchard mused. ‘What come to Moon? Spit-Kid we know about.’

‘Moon—Moon! Now where did I last . . .? Oh yes, when I was in the Palladium. I met Quigley at Buncrana Station. He told me Moon ’ad run when the Astrild sloop was cruising among the South Seas three years back. He always showed signs o’ bein’ a Mormonastic beggar. Yes, he slipped off quietly an’ they ’adn’t time to chase ’im round the islands even if the navigatin’ officer ’ad been equal to the job.’

‘Wasn’t he?’ said Hooper.

‘Not so. Accordin’ to Quigley the Astrild spent half her commission rompin’ up the beach like a she-turtle, an’ the other half hatching turtles’ eggs on the top o’ numerous reefs. When she was docked at Sydney her copper looked like Aunt Maria’s washing on the line—an’ her ’midship frames was sprung. The commander swore the dockyard ’ad done it haulin’ the pore thing on to the slips. They do do strange things at sea, Mr. Hooper.’

‘Ah! I’m not a taxpayer,’ said Hooper, and opened a fresh bottle. The Sergeant seemed to be one who had a difficulty in dropping subjects.

‘How it all comes back, don’t it?’ he said. ‘Why, Moon must ’ave ’ad sixteen years’ service before he ran.’

‘It takes ’em at all ages. Look at—you know,’ said Pyecroft.

‘Who?’ I asked.

‘A service man within eighteen months of his pension is the party you’re thinkin’ of,’ said Pritchard. ‘A warrant ’oo’s name begins with a V., isn’t it?’

‘But, in a way o’ puttin’ it, we can’t say that he actually did desert,’ Pyecroft suggested.

‘Oh no,’ said Pritchard. ‘It was only permanent absence up-country without leaf. That was all.’

‘Up-country?’ said Hooper. ‘Did they circulate his description?’

‘What for?’ said Pritchard, most impolitely.

‘Because deserters are like columns in the war. They don’t move away from the line, you see. I’ve known a chap caught at Salisbury that way tryin’ to get to Nyassa. They tell me, but o’ course I don’t know, that they don’t ask questions on the Nyassa Lake Flotilla up there. I’ve heard of a P. and O. quartermaster in full command of an armed launch there.’

‘Do you think Click ’ud ha’ gone up that way?’ Pritchard asked.

‘There’s no saying. He was sent up to Bloemfontein to take over some Navy ammunition left in the fort. We know he took it over and saw it into the trucks. Then there was no more Click—then or thereafter. Four months ago it transpired, and thus the casus belli stands at present,’ said Pyecroft.

‘What were his marks?’ said Hooper again.

‘Does the Railway get a reward for returnin’ ’em, then?’ said Pritchard.

‘If I did d’you suppose I’d talk about it?’ Hooper retorted angrily.

‘You seemed so very interested,’ said Pritchard with equal crispness.

‘Why was he called Click?’ I asked, to tide over an uneasy little break in the conversation. The two men were staring at each other very fixedly.

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‘Because of an ammunition hoist carryin’ away,’ said Pyecroft. ‘And it carried away four of ’is teeth-on the lower port side, wasn’t it, Pritch? The substitutes which he bought weren’t screwed home, in a manner o’ sayin’. When he talked fast they used to lift a little on the bedplate. ’Ence, “Click.” They called ’im a superior man, which is what we’d call a long, black-’aired, genteelly-speakin’,’alf-bred beggar on the lower deck.’

‘Four false teeth in the lower left jaw,’ said Hooper, his hand in his waistcoat-pocket. ‘What tattoo marks?’

‘Look here,’ began Pritchard, half rising. ‘I’m sure we’re very grateful to you as a gentleman for your ’orspitality, but per’aps we may ’ave made an error in——’

I looked at Pyecroft for aid—Hooper was crimsoning rapidly.

‘If the fat marine now occupying the foc’sle will kindly bring ’is status quo to an anchor yet once more, we may be able to talk like gentlemen—not to say friends,’ said Pyecroft. ‘He regards you, Mr. Hooper, as a emissary of the Law.’

‘I only wish to observe that when a gentleman exhibits such a peculiar, or I should rather say, such a bloomin’ curiosity in identification marks as our friend here——’

‘Mr. Pritchard,’ I interposed, ‘I’ll take all the responsibility for Mr. Hooper.’

‘An’ you’ll apologise all round,’ said Pyecroft. ‘You’re a rude little man, Pritch.’

‘But how was I——’ he began, wavering.

‘I don’t know an’ I don’t care. Apologise!’

The giant looked round bewildered and took our little hands into his vast grip, one by one.

‘I was wrong,’ he said meekly as a sheep. ‘My suspicions was unfounded. Mr. Hooper, I apologise.’

‘You did quite right to look out for your own end o’ the line,’ said Hooper. ‘I’d ha’ done the same with a gentleman I didn’t know, you see. If you don’t mind I’d like to hear a little more o’ your Mr. Vickery. It’s safe with me, you see.’

‘Why did Vickery run?’ I began, but Pyecroft’s smile made me turn my question to ‘Who was she?’

‘She kep’ a little hotel at Hauraki—near Auckland,’ said Pyecroft.

‘By Gawd!’ roared Pritchard, slapping his hand on his leg. ‘Not Mrs. Bathurst!’

Pyecroft nodded slowly, and the Sergeant called all the powers of darkness to witness his bewilderment.

‘So far as I could get at it, Mrs. B. was the lady in question.’

‘But Click was married,’ cried Pritchard.

‘An’ ’ad a fifteen-year-old daughter. ’E’s shown me her photograph. Settin’ that aside, so to say, ’ave you ever found these little things make much difference? Because I haven’t.’

‘Good Lord Alive an’ Watchin’! . . . Mrs. Bathurst. . . .’ Then with another roar: ‘You can say what you please, Pye, but you don’t make me believe it was any of ’er fault. She wasn’t that!’

‘If I was going to say what I please, I’d begin by callin’ you a silly ox an’ work up to the higher pressures at leisure. I’m trying to say solely what transpired. M’rover, for once you’re right. It wasn’t her fault.’

‘You couldn’t ’aven’t made me believe it if it ’ad been,’ was the answer.

Such faith in a Sergeant of Marines interested me greatly. ‘Never mind about that,’ I cried. ‘Tell me what she was like.’

‘She was a widow,’ said Pyecroft. ‘Left so very young and never re-spliced. She kep’ a little hotel for warrants and noncoms close to Auckland, an’ she always wore black silk, and ’er neck——’

‘You ask what she was like,’ Pritchard broke in. ‘Let me give you an instance. I was at Auckland first in ’97, at the end o’ the Marroquin’s commission, an’ as I’d been promoted I went up with the others. She used to look after us all, an’ she never lost by it—not a penny! “Pay me now,” she’d say, “or settle later. I know you won’t let me suffer. Send the money from home if you like.” Why, gentlemen all, I tell you I’ve seen that lady take her own gold watch an’ chain off her neck in the bar an’ pass it to a bosun ’oo’d come ashore without ’is ticker an’ ’ad to catch the last boat. “I don’t know your name,” she said, “but when you’ve done with it, you’ll find plenty that know me on the front. Send it back by one o’ them.” And it was worth thirty pounds if it was worth ’arf-a-crown. The little gold watch, Pye, with the blue monogram at the back. But, as I was sayin’, in those days she kep’ a beer that agreed with me—Slits it was called. One way an’ another I must ’ave punished a good few bottles of it while we was in the bay—comin’ ashore every night or so. Chaffin’ across the bar like, once when we were alone, “Mrs. B.,” I said, “when next I call I want you to remember that this is my particular just as you’re my particular.” (She’d let you go that far!) “Just as you’re my particular,” I said. “Oh, thank you, Sergeant Pritchard,” she says, an’ put ’er hand up to the curl be’ind ’er ear. Remember that way she had, Pye?’

‘I think so,’ said the sailor.

‘Yes, “Thank you, Sergeant Pritchard,” she says. “The least I can do is to mark it for you in case you change your mind. There’s no great demand for it in the Fleet,” she says, “but to make sure I’ll put it at the back o’ the shelf,” an’ she snipped off apiece of her hair ribbon with that old dolphin cigar-cutter on the bar – remember it, Pye?—an’ she tied a bow round what was left just four bottles. That was ’97-no, ’96. In ’98 I was in the Resilient—China station—full commission. In Nineteen One, mark you, I was in the Carthusian, back in Auckland Bay again. Of course I went up to Mrs. B.’s with the rest of us to see how things were goin’. They were the same as ever. (Remember the big tree on the pavement by the side-bar, Pye?) I never said anythin’ in special (there was too many of us talkin’ to her), but she saw me at once.’

‘That wasn’t difficult?’ I ventured.

‘Ah, but wait. I was comin’ up to the bar, when, “Ada,” she says to her niece, “get me Sergeant Pritchard’s particular,” and, gentlemen all, I tell you before I could shake ’ands with the lady, there were those four bottles o’ Slits, with ’er ’air-ribbon in a bow round each o’ their necks, set down in front o’ me, an’ as she drew the cork she looked at me under her eyebrows in that blindish way she had o’ lookin’, an’, “Sergeant Pritchard,” she says, “I do ’ope you ’aven’t changed your mind about your particulars.” That’s the kind o’ woman she was—after five years!’

page 4

‘I don’t see her yet somehow,’ said Hooper, but with sympathy.

‘She—she never scrupled to feed a lame duck or set ’er foot on a scorpion at any time of ’er life,’ Pritchard added valiantly.

‘That don’t help me either. My mother’s like that for one.’

The giant heaved inside his uniform and rolled his eyes at the car-roof. Said Pyecroft suddenly:—

‘How many women have you been intimate with all over the world, Pritch?’

Pritchard ’blushed plum-colour to the short hairs of his seventeen-inch neck.

‘’Undreds,’ said Pyecroft. ‘So’ve I. How many of ’em can you remember in your own mind, settin’ aside the first—an’ per’aps the last—and one more?’

‘Few, wonderful few, now I tax myself,’ said Sergeant Pritchard relievedly.

‘An’ how many times might you ’ave been at Auckland?’

‘One—two,’ he began—‘why, I can’t make it more than three times in ten years. But I can remember every time that I ever saw Mrs. B.’

‘So can I—an’ I’ve only been to Auckland twice—how she stood an’ what she was sayin’ an’ what she looked like. That’s the secret. ’Tisn’t beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It’s just It. Some women’ll stay in a man’s memory if they once walk down a street, but most of ’em you can live with a month on end, an’ next commission you’d be put to it to certify whether they talked in their sleep or not, as one might say.’

‘Ah!’ said Hooper. ‘That’s more the idea. I’ve known just two women of that nature.’

‘An’ it was no fault o’ theirs ?’ asked Pritchard.

‘None whatever. I know that!’

‘An’ if a man gets struck with that kind o’ woman, Mr. Hooper?’ Pritchard went on.

‘He goes crazy—or just saves himself,’ was the slow answer.

‘You’ve hit it,’ said the Sergeant. ‘You’ve seen an’ known somethin’ in the course o’ your life, Mr. Hooper. I’m lookin’ at you!’ He set down his bottle.

‘And how often had Vickery seen her?’ I asked.

‘That’s the dark an’ bloody mystery,’ Pyecroft answered. ‘I’d never come across him till I come out in the Hierophant just now, an’ there wasn’t any one in the ship who knew much about him. You see, he was what you call a superior man. ’E spoke to me once or twice about Auckland and Mrs. B. on the voyage out. I called that to mind subsequently. There must ’ave been a good deal between ’em, to my way o’ thinkin’. Mind you, I’m only giving you my résumé of it all, because all I know is second-hand so to speak, or rather I should say more than second-’and.’

‘How?’ said Hooper peremptorily. ‘You must have seen it or heard it.’

‘Ye-es,’ said Pyecroft. ‘I used to think seein’ and hearin’ was the only regulation aids to ascertainin’ facts, but as we get older we get more accommodatin’. The cylinders work easier, I suppose . . . . Were you in Cape Town last December when Phyllis’s Circus came?’

‘No—up-country,’ said Hooper, a little nettled at the change of venue.

‘I ask because they had a new turn of a scientific nature called “Home and Friends for a Tickey.” ‘

‘Oh, you mean the cinematograph—the pictures of prize-fights and steamers. I’ve seen ’em upcountry.’

‘Biograph or cinematograph was what I was alludin’ to. London Bridge with the omnibuses—a troopship goin’ to the war—marines on parade at Portsmouth, an’ the Plymouth Express arrivin’ at Paddin’ton.’

‘Seen ’em all. Seen ’em all,’ said Hooper impatiently.

‘We Hierophants came in just before Christmas week an’ leaf was easy.’

‘I think a man gets fed up with Cape Town quicker than anywhere else on the station. Why, even Durban’s more like Nature. We was there for Christmas,’ Pritchard put in.

‘Not bein’ a devotee of Indian peeris, as our Doctor said to the Pusser, I can’t exactly say. Phyllis’s was good enough after musketry practice at Mozambique. I couldn’t get off the first two or three nights on account of what you might call an imbroglio with our Torpedo Lieutenant in the submerged flat, where some pride of the West Country had sugared up a gyroscope; but I remember Vickery went ashore with our Carpenter Rigdon—old Crocus we called him. As a general rule Crocus never left ’is ship unless an’ until he was ’oisted out with a winch, but when ’e went ’e would return noddin’ like a lily gemmed with dew. We smothered him down below that night, but the things ’e said about Vickery as a fittin’ playmate for a Warrant Officer of ’is cubic capacity, before we got him quiet, was what I should call pointed.’

‘I’ve been with Crocus—in the Redoubtable,’ said the Sergeant. ‘He’s a character if there is one.’

‘Next night I went into Cape Town with Dawson and Pratt; but just at the door of the Circus I came across Vickery. “Oh!” he says, “you’re the man I’m looking for. Come and sit next me. This way to the shillin’ places!” I went astern at once, protestin’ because tickey seats better suited my so-called finances. “Come on,” says Vickery, “I’m payin’.” Naturally I abandoned Pratt and Dawson in anticipation o’ drinks to match the seats. “No,” he says, when this was ’inted—“not now. Not now. As many as you please afterwards, but I want you sober for the occasion.” I caught ’is face under a lamp just then, an’ the appearance of it quite cured me of my thirst. Don’t mistake. It didn’t frighten me. It made me anxious. I can’t tell you what it was like, but that was the effect which it ’ad on me. If you want to know, it reminded me of those things in bottles in those herbalistic shops at Plymouth—preserved in spirits of wine. White an’ crumply things—previous to birth as you might say.’

‘You ’ave a beastial mind, Pye,’ said the Sergeant, relighting his pipe.

page 5

‘Perhaps. We were in the front row, an’ “Home an’ Friends” came on early. Vickery touched me on the knee when the number went up. “If you see anything that strikes you,” he says, “drop me a hint”; then he went on clicking. We saw London Bridge an’ so forth an’ so on, an’ it was most interestin’. I’d never seen it before. You ’eard a little dynamo like buzzin’, but the pictures were the real thing—alive an’ movin’.’

‘I’ve seen ’em,’ said Hooper. ‘Of course they are taken from the very thing itself—you see.’

‘Then the Western Mail came in to Paddin’ton on the big magic-lantern sheet. First we saw the platform empty an’ the porters standin’ by. Then the engine come in, head on, an’ the women in the front row jumped: she headed so straight. Then the doors opened and the passengers came out and the porters got the luggage just like life. Only—only when any one came down too far towards us that was watchin’, they walked right out o’ the picture, so to speak. I was ’ighly interested, I can tell you. So were all of us. I watched an old man with a rug ’oo’d dropped a book an’ was tryin’ to pick it up, when quite slowly, from be’ind two porters—carryin’ a little reticule an’ lookin’ from side to side—comes out Mrs. Bathurst. There was no mistakin’ the walk in a hundred thousand. She come forward—right forward—she looked out straight at us with that blindish look which Pritch alluded to. She walked on and on till she melted out of the picture—like—like a shadow jumpin’ over a candle, an’ as she went I ’eard Dawson in the tickey seats be’ind sing out: “Christ! there’s Mrs. B.!”’

Hooper swallowed his spittle and leaned forward intently.

‘Vickery touched me on the knee again. He was clickin’ his four false teeth with his jaw down like an enteric at the last kick. “Are you sure?” says he. “Sure,” I says, “didn’t you ’ear Dawson give tongue? Why, it’s the woman herself.” “I was sure before,” he says, “but I brought you to make sure. Will you come again with me tomorrow?”

‘“Willingly,” I says, “it’s like meetin’ old friends.”

‘“Yes,” he says, openin’ his watch, “very like. It will be four-and-twenty hours less four minutes before I see her again. Come and have a drink,” he says. “It may amuse you, but it’s no sort of earthly use to me.” He went out shaking his head an’ stumblin’ over people’s feet as if he was drunk already. I anticipated a swift drink an’ a speedy return, because I wanted to see the performin’ elephants. Instead o’ which Vickery began to navigate the town at the rate o’ knots, lookin’ in at a bar every three minutes approximate Greenwich time. I’m not a drinkin’ man, though there are those present’;—he cocked his unforgettable eye at me—‘who may have seen me more or less imbued with the fragrant spirit. None the less when I drink I like to do it at anchor an’ not at an average speed of eighteen knots on the measured mile. There’s a tank as you might say at the back o’ that big hotel up the hill—what do they call it?’

‘The Molteno Reservoir,’ I suggested, and Hooper nodded.

‘That was his limit o’ drift. We walked there an’ we come down through the Gardens—there was a South-Easter blowin’—an’ we finished up by the Docks. Then we bore up the road to Salt River, and wherever there was a pub Vickery put in sweatin’. He didn’t look at what he drunk—he didn’t look at the change. He walked an’ he drunk an’ he perspired in rivers. I understood why old Crocus ’ad come back in the condition ’e did, because Vickery an’ I ’ad two an’ a half hours o’ this gipsy manœuvre an’ when we got back to the station there wasn’t a dry atom on or in me.’

‘Did he say anything?’ Pritchard asked.

‘The sum total of ’is conversation from 7.45 p.m. till 11.15 p.m. was “Let’s have another.” Thus the mornin’ an’ the evenin’ were the first day, as Scripture says . . . . To abbreviate a lengthy narrative, I went into Cape Town for five consecutive nights with Master Vickers, and in that time I must ’ave logged about fifty knots over the ground an’ taken in two gallon o’ all the worst spirits south the Equator. The evolution never varied. Two shilling seats for us two; five minutes o’ the pictures, an’ perhaps forty-five seconds o’ Mrs. B. walking down towards us with that blindish look in her eyes an’ the reticule in her hand. Then out-walk—and drink till train time.’

‘What did you think?’ said Hooper, his hand fingering his waistcoat-pocket.

‘Several things,’ said Pyecroft. ‘To tell you the truth, I aren’t quite done thinkin’ about it yet. Mad? The man was a dumb lunatic—must ’ave been for months—years p’raps. I know somethin’ o’ maniacs, as every man in the Service must. I’ve been shipmates with a mad skipper—an’ a lunatic Number One, but never both together, I thank ’Eaven. I could give you the names o’ three captains now ’oo ought to be in an asylum, but you don’t find me interferin’ with the mentally afflicted till they begin to lay about ’em with rammers an’ winch-handles. Only once I crept up a little into the wind towards Master Vickers. “I wonder what she’s doin’ in England,” I says. “Don’t it seem to you she’s lookin’ for somebody?” That was in the Gardens again, with the South-Easter blowin’ as we were makin’ our desperate round. “She’s lookin’ for me,” he says, stoppin’ dead under a lamp an’ clickin’. When he wasn’t drinkin’, in which case all ’is teeth clicked on the glass, ’e was clickin’ ’is four false teeth like a Marconi ticker. “Yes! lookin’ for me,” he said, an’ he went on very softly an’ as you might say affectionately. “But,” he went on, “in future, Mr. Pyecroft, I should take it kindly of you if you’d confine your remarks to the drinks set before you. Otherwise,” he says, “with the best will in the world towards you, I may find myself guilty of murder! Do you understand?” he says. “Perfectly,” I says, “but would it at all soothe you to know that in such a case the chances o’ your being killed are precisely equivalent to the chances o’ me being outed.” “Why, no,” he says, “I’m almost afraid that ’ud be a temptation.” Then I said—we was right under the lamp by that arch at the end o’ the Gardens where the trams come round—“Assumin’ murder was done—or attempted murder—I put it to you that you would still be left so badly crippled, as one might say, that your subsequent capture by the police—to ’oom you would ’ave to explain—would be largely inevitable.” “That’s better,” ’e says, passin’ ’is hands over his forehead. “That’s much better, because,” he says, “do you know, as I am now, Pye, I’m not so sure if I could explain anything much.” Those were the only particular words I had with ’im in our walks as I remember.’

‘What walks!’ said Hooper. ‘Oh my soul, what walks!’

page 6

‘They were chronic,’ said Pyecroft gravely, ‘but I didn’t anticipate any danger till the Circus left. Then I anticipated that, bein’ deprived of ’is stimulant, he might react on me, so to say, with a hatchet. Consequently, after the final performance an’ the ensuin’ wet walk, I kep’ myself aloof from my superior officer on board in the execution of is duty, as you might put it. Consequently, I was interested when the sentry informs me while I was passin’ on my lawful occasions that Click had asked to see the captain. As a general rule warrant-officers don’t dissipate much of the owner’s time, but Click put in an hour and more be’ind that door. My duties kep’ me within eyeshot of it. Vickery came out first, an’ ’e actually nodded at me an’ smiled. This knocked me out o’ the boat, because, havin’ seen ’is face for five consecutive nights, I didn’t anticipate any change there more than a condenser in hell, so to speak. The owner emerged later. His face didn’t read off at all, so I fell back on his cox, ’oo’d been eight years with him and knew him better than boat signals. Lamson—that was the cox’s name—crossed ’is bows once or twice at low speeds an’ dropped down to me visibly concerned. “He’s shipped ’is court-martial face,” says Lamson. “Some one’s goin’ to be ’ung. I’ve never seen that look but once before, when they chucked the gun-sights overboard in the Fantastic.” Throwin’ gun-sights overboard, Mr. Hooper, is the equivalent for mutiny in these degenerate days. It’s done to attract the notice of the authorities an’ the Western Mornin’ News—generally by a stoker. Naturally, word went round the lower deck an’ we had a private over’aul of our little consciences. But, barrin’ a shirt which a second-class stoker said ’ad walked into ’is bag from the marines’ flat by itself, nothin’ vital transpired. The owner went about flyin’ the signal for “attend public execution,” so to say, but there was no corpse at the yard-arm. ’E lunched on the beach an’ ’e returned with ’is regulation harbour-routine face about 3 p.m. Thus Lamson lost prestige for raising false alarms. The only person ’oo might ’ave connected the epicycloidal gears correctly was one Pyecroft, when he was told that Mr. Vickery would go up-country that same evening to take over certain naval ammunition left after the war in Bloemfontein Fort. No details was ordered to accompany Master Vickery. He was told off first person singular—as a unit—by himself.’

The marine whistled penetratingly.

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Pyecroft. ‘I went ashore with him in the cutter an’ ’e asked me to walk through the station. He was clickin’ audibly, but otherwise seemed happy-ish.

‘“You might like to know,” he says, stoppin’ just opposite the Admiral’s front gate, “that Phyllis’s Circus will be performin’ at Worcester to-morrow night. So I shall see ’er yet once again. You’ve been very patient with me,” he says.

‘“Look here, Vickery,” I said, “this thing’s come to be just as much as I can stand. Consume your own smoke. I don’t want to know any more.”

‘“You!” he said. “What have you got to complain of?—you’ve only ’ad to watch. I’m it,” he says, “but that’s neither here nor there,” he says. “I’ve one thing to say before shakin’ ’ands. Remember,” ’e says—we were just by the Admiral’s garden-gate then—“remember that I am not a murderer, because my lawful wife died in childbed six weeks after I came out. That much at least I am clear of,” ’e says.

‘“Then what have you done that signifies?” I said. “What’s the rest of it?”

‘“The rest,” ’e says, “is silence,” an’ he shook ’ands and went clickin’ into Simonstown station.’

‘Did he stop to see Mrs. Bathurst at Worcester?’ I asked.

‘It’s not known. He reported at Bloemfontein, saw the ammunition into the trucks, and then ’e disappeared. Went out—deserted, if you care to put it so—within eighteen months of his pension, an’ if what ’e said about ’is wife was true he was a free man as ’e then stood. How do you read it off?’

‘Poor devil!’ said Hooper. ‘To see her that way every night! I wonder what it was.’

‘I’ve made my ’ead ache in that direction many a long night.’

‘But I’ll swear Mrs. B. ’ad no ’and in it,’ said the Sergeant, unshaken.

‘No. Whatever the wrong or deceit was, he did it, I’m sure o’ that. I ’ad to look at ’is face for five consecutive nights. I’m not so fond o’ navigatin’ about Cape Town with a South-Easter blowin’ these days. I can hear those teeth click, so to say.’

‘Ah, those teeth,’ said Hooper, and his hand went to his waistcoat-pocket once more. ‘Permanent things false teeth are. You read about ’em in all the murder trials.’

‘What d’you suppose the captain knew—or did?’ I asked.

‘I’ve never turned my searchlight that way,’ Pyecroft answered unblushingly.

We all reflected together, and drummed on empty beer bottles as the picnic-party, sunburned, wet, and sandy, passed our door singing ‘The Honeysuckle and the Bee.’

‘Pretty girl under that kapje,’ said Pyecroft.

‘They never circulated his description?’ said Pritchard.

‘I was askin’ you before these gentlemen came,’ said Hooper to me, ‘whether you knew Wankies—on the way to the Zambesi—beyond Bulawayo?’

‘Would he pass there—tryin’ to get to that Lake what’s ’is name?’ said Pritchard.

Hooper shook his head and went on: ‘There’s a curious bit o’ line there, you see. It runs through solid teak forest—a sort o’ mahogany really—seventy-two miles without a curve. I’ve had a train derailed there twenty-three times in forty miles. I was up there a month ago relievin’ a sick inspector, you see. He told me to look out for a couple of tramps in the teak.’

‘Two?’ Pyecroft said. ‘I don’t envy that other man if——’

‘We get heaps of tramps up there since the war. The inspector told me I’d find ’em at M’Bindwe siding waiting to go North. He’d given ’em some grub and quinine, you see. I went up on a construction train. I looked out for ’em. I saw them miles ahead along the straight, waiting in the teak. One of ’em was standin’ up by the dead-end of the siding an’ the other was squattin’ down lookin’ up at ’im, you see.’

‘What did you do for ’em?’ said Pritchard.

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‘There wasn’t much I could do, except bury ’em. There’d been a bit of a thunderstorm in the teak, you see, and they were both stone dead and as black as charcoal. That’s what they really were, you see—charcoal. They fell to bits when we tried to shift ’em. The man who was standin’ up had the false teeth. I saw ’em shinin’ against the black. Fell to bits he did too, like his mate squatting down an’ watchin’ him, both of ’em all wet in the rain. Both burned to charcoal, you see. And—that’s what made me ask about marks just now—the false-toother was tattooed on the arms and chest—a crown and foul anchor with M.V. above.’

‘I’ve seen that,’ said Pyecroft quickly. ‘It was so.’

‘But if he was all charcoal-like?’ said Pritchard, shuddering.

‘You know how writing shows up white on a burned letter? Well, it was like that, you see. We buried ’em in the teak and I kept . . . But he was a friend of you two gentlemen, you see.’

Mr. Hooper brought his hand away from his waistcoat-pocket—empty.

Pritchard covered his face with his hands for a moment, like a child shutting out an ugliness.

‘And to think of her at Hauraki!’ he murmured—‘with ’er ’air-ribbon on my beer. “Ada,” she said to her niece . . . Oh, my Gawd !’ . . .

‘On a summer afternoon,
when the honeysuckle blooms,
And all Nature seems at rest,
Underneath the bower,
’mid the perfume of the flower,
Sat a maiden with the one
she loves the best——’

sang the picnic-party waiting for their train at Glengariff.

‘Well, I don’t know how you feel about it,’ said Pyecroft, ‘but ’avin’ seen ’is face for five consecutive nights on end, I’m inclined to finish what’s left of the beer an’ thank Gawd he’s dead!’

I was reading an odd number of the St. George’s Gazette and, studying the motto for the thousandth time, fell into a muse.

The Fates have called me across the track of the Old Regiment fairly early and fairly often. First eastward to Lahore, six miles distant by dusty roads from the cantonments of Mian Mir. This was after the 8th, who were relieved by the 30th, had been badly hit by cholera and fever, and had left a good many men where, as the song says:

Underneath that kunkar dry
Twenty thousand corpses lie,
Flower of Runjit’s soldiery—
  Slain by sickness, not the sword;
And above them, white and grey,
Stands, a mark for miles away,
Church of good St. Golgotha
  To the Glory of the Lord!

To the 30th succeeded THE FIFTH. I saw them come in, a thousand and eighty strong — smallish tough men, all of a size and most with a grateful Northumbrian burr. It was their custom once a year to adorn their helmets with red and white roses, in honour of a certain saint — roses plucked from the sides of the Thanda Sark — such roses as grow at Amritzar for the distilleries — heavy-scented Bengal roses. To this hour a certain smell of roses in hot sunshine brings back to me a certain corner outside the Lawrence Hall Gate, where a be-wreathed and fragrant Fusilier was (for good reason) bundled into an ekka just in time to save his being seen by an officer driving to polo. I am afraid my first introduction to THE FIFTH was not precisely through regular channels; but it was very useful.

Later, I became the guest of a frivolous person who told me that a new and shy subaltern had just joined and that we would drink wine with him. This we did upon a guest-night, so that presently he grew thoughtful and went to bed. That night stands out very clearly in my memory. I recall the new-joined boy’s pink-and-white face turned to my host’s; there was no shadow of Stormberg or Sanna’s Post to darken either, and the huge Captain, behind whose back we jested, never dreamed that he would one day command an entirely new Battalion of the Old Regiment. I remember the sparkle of the Mess plate; the rattle and riot of the chaff down among the subalterns; the kindly voice of the Colonel asking me about his son, with whom I had been at school; the slight lisp of a junior Captain who trained ponies (The Witch was one, I believe) to walk into unexpected places (same as he did west of Belmont later); and certain songs that were sung till the glasses danced in the European Infantry Mess — in the days of the Martini-Henry Rifle when THE FIFTH were new to Mian Mir.

The Fates called me not seldom to that Mess, where I listened to the band; and to those barracks, where I listened to other matters; to the Lawrence Hall, where we danced, not counting ‘Cinderellas’, thrice a week for four months of the year; to the carefully-flooded tennis-courts near the bougainvilleas, and to the Lahore racecourse (one mile, six furlongs, twenty yards) and to the brick-hard polo-ground opposite the grandstand. There were three or four subalterns with whom I specially played, and in return they played with me at the Club and in Fort Lahore when they went up on detachment. Who among the living — the estimable round Majors with D.S.O.’s — remembers our weird cold-weather dinners in the old tomb which was the Fort Mess-room, when we sat down in our poshteens and mingled ten—fifteen—twenty-five— grains at a time of quinine with our sherry and bitters, and talked of everything under heaven till it was time to visit the sentries? Who remembers the coughing ponies outside the guard-gate where Runjit Singh sleeps with eleven of his wives; the clatter of sleepy feet descending the brick steps of the Quarter-guard; and the disgraceful attempt of a civilian (at 2 A.M.) to personate Visiting Rounds? Who remembers the ghosts — the real ghosts? The Banjo that played by Itself, and the quarters over against the Shish Mahal where the Manifestations took place? The long, hot, dusty evenings when we sat above the Ditch watching the parrots coming back from the river like so much shrieking green shrapnel. The stillness of the interminable nights when the stars swung behind the Mosque of Wazir Khan? The snarl and worry-worry of a Mohurrum riot within the walls; or the dull boom of the city waking to another day of heat and sickness? We had not much money, but one way or another we did see life — of a queer sort—up in old Fort Lahore.

For the rest, THE FIFTH raced and sat up late in lottery tents (‘Nine hundred and forty rupees in the lottery and Grey Hen for sale!’) and made more or less calamitous books with the local talent. Strong confederacies wandered up and down the Punjab, and gentlemen riders (‘catch-weights over ten stone’) rode furiously. How were we to know that some of the gayest of that gay crowd would presently put aside childish things and live austerely between Prieska and Calvinia; burying the dead rebel with the ritual of the New, and chasing the living with the rigour of the Old Testament? We were more interested in Blitz, the most perfect Arab gentleman who ever looked through a bridle, for he was Lord of Upper India; and in Nina, little thirteen-hand Nina, the Lahore Confederacy’s country-bred, who ran him second for the Civil Service Cup. Also there was Lucky Boy, bought out of an ekka by a far-sighted subaltern, and he became a wonder, and cost some of us money; and there was Gazelle, who had manners, and Nana, who had none; and Rob Roy, who could jump, and Telephone, who was lame, and a brute called The Professor. Behind all was Afzul of the Kashmir Serai, ever ready to sell remounts. Sometimes; of course, things went wrong and horses fell down (or lottery-tents took fire), and on those occasions THE FIFTH may or may not have gone, with the rest of us, to Bunsee Lal and Ram Rutton for a little ready cash. In the intervals they cheered themselves with poora gin-tonic-and-bitters or the estimable ‘Macdougal,’ ‘MacDonald,’ or ‘Bamboo’ as the seasons varied, and their tastes prompted.

They gave dances, sumptuous ones, to the up-to-date tunes of See-Saw and Dream Faces, and among the guests were men looking rather like mere Captains of P3 or K2, who were destined to do heavy work in and outside Ladysmith. They gave theatricals — Alonzo the Brave, for instance, when one who is now a Colonel, but has been a Sergeant (Klooque for choice), capered in a table-cloth before eight hundred of his delighted men, and the immortal Vasey, as Martha, knocked us down in perishing heaps.

‘But’, says one looking over my shoulder, ‘you are only describing what every regiment in the East has done from time immemorial. If you went to Mian Mir to-morrow, you’d find the Royal Sussex, or who-ever it is, carrying on precisely like THE FIFTH.’

This is probably true, but still I cannot bring myself to believe that those (Orange) lilies of the field toil and spin as festively as did St. George and the Dragon. Perhaps their regimental paper will furnish a confidential report on these heads. Do they ever sit up so late at the Club that, to save parade, they snatch other people’s carts at 4.45 A.M. and sent them back with several spokes out of each wheel? Can they change into uniform en route; the sais driving over the back while the Sahib struggles into trousers and tunic? Have they ever seduced a pony—ekka—native—one in number—into a Major’s tent and lain out half the night to hear what the Major would say to his visitor? Do they know a ‘writter’ when they see him, and can they make that ‘writter’ happy and contented down by the elephant lines? Have they ever attended a Christmas week with the Piffers, and helped them play ‘Quill Snookers’ with a coiled-up hedgehog till the baize of the billiard-table looked like a bracken-patch, and the Club Secretary stood on one leg from pure emotion? Can they drive ‘random’—three agitated entries in a string—and coil up the whole outfit round a gate-post in the cold, cold moonlight? Have they ever dined at the Mess of the Door that Won’t Shut? Do they know the way to Baoli Lehna Singh, where the pig come from? And, if so, at whose house do they eat curried eggs and drink Pilsener after the pig-stick is over? I have a perfectly unjust notion, born of envy and the years, that the Royal Sussex (who, I take it, have been the 35th) cut up and down the Outram Road in motor-cars discussing problem plays over a nimbu-esquaash, and that if you asked them where you could get a bit of paper done on reasonable terms, they would probably direct you to the nearest printing-office. There were no days like the old days, and there was no regiment like the Old Regiment!

THE FIFTH stayed at Mian Mir a little too long, and the fever, at which they had scoffed on their arrival, hit them heavily. When they trooped the Colours at the First Jubilee, outside Fort Lahore on a February morning in ’87, there were many blue-gowned invalids hanging over the rails and explaining with the proper nicknames the merits, etc., of their company officers, Thus (for it doesn’t matter after fifteen years): ‘Collars and Cuffs is a good little man, but I do wish ‘e didn’t smell ‘is sword so, at the salute. There ‘e goes, as if it were a bloomin’ posy.’ Or judicially: ‘The Major’s running to belly something shockin’. ‘E’s ‘ad that old tunic let out again,’ or pathetically to a friend: ‘That’s Amelia! ‘Im an’ ‘is pet Sergeant ‘ave been persecutin’ me for the past three months; an’ look at ‘im now—trailin’ ‘is company ‘alf over the maidan like a kite with the string cut.’ (You must remember Lahore City was full of people flying kites, and the simile, for a company edging into line five seconds too late, is very nearly perfect.) There used to be some very good mimics in the ranks, and they could reproduce the manners and tones of their officers with an unholy skill. What they did not know, the officers’ servants supplied. Whereby they were enabled to give before a shouting barrack-room or a giggling Married Quarters an accurate presentment of Lieutenant So-and-so getting himself up regardless for an afternoon ride with Miss Such Another; or, better still, the blushing joy of Second Lieutenant Sweetlips paddling about among his razors on the occasion of his first real shave.

I am not quite sure whether THE FIFTH stayed out the First Jubilee hot weather with us. If they did they will preserve some record of that ghastly sing-song on Coronation night, ‘The Judgment Day Sing-Song’ — when Mian Mir broke all records in the way of heat and we lost a Colonel of native cavalry, a Sergeant’s wife, a private, and, I think, two children, all of heat-apoplexy, before the day broke. There was a red-hot wind, and stirrup-irons burned through dress-pumps, and the dust cut like lava in the nostrils; and I remember the lines of white faces in the glare of the tossing flare-lamps as the comic singers (one of them was a very first-class Chaplain) sweated and dripped.

In that year our ways divided. I went South, and picked up with a rather fascinating Cockney regiment full of talent in the step-dance and conjuring line, and THE FIFTH moved on their appointed path to Pindi. But in one way or another, I kept touch with the Old Regiment, picking up news here and there year after year.

At last all the names changed, and the Army List was a horror to read, and everybody grew up. So, after Omdurman, I said: ‘I am tired of these men who die and retire and are seconded. The Service is going to the dogs, and I will sever my connection with it.’

Then the Fates called with a vengeance—called THE FIFTH to Stormberg, and me to Cape Town. In that cheerful city (and Cape Town, before Ladysmith and Kimberley were relieved, was about as gay as Murree when the cholera broke out) I ran across a subaltern of the old FIFTH, thinly disguised as a Major in the Intelligence. He gave me news — more than I wanted; he told me of two or three ex-FIFTH men I should be likely to meet up the line, and when I went North he confided to my care about a quarter of a ton of documents for the Intelligence at Bloemfontein. This he did because he had heard of my singular uprightness and tact and discretion at Mian Mir, when a long-legged lunatic with an Irish brogue dropped the ticca-gharri horse into the culvert and we pulled it out with punkah ropes, and the gharri went home entirely on the spokes of its front wheels because it had mislaid its tires. In return, he heard my holiest thoughts about the Intelligence Department.

That journey North was pure joy. Three out of five men that I had ever known in India seemed to be on the line or near it. I tumbled over them at wayside stations, in telegraph offices, and dongas; in camps, in ammunition-columns, and hospitals — the men from Cherat, and Sialkot, and Pindi, and Umballa, and Mian Mir, and the other good places of perpetual youth. Some of them pretended to be Brigadiers and things of a repulsive nature, but, as a matter of fact, the shadow turned back on the dial, and we were all young, and we talked the slang of our stations and loyally backed each other’s biggest lies (particularly when any Egyptian officers were about) lest the prestige of the East should suffer. Those Bimbashi and Kaimakan-log are really quite respectable fictionists for amateurs. Some of them almost forced some of us to a twelve-anna gallop. But we won. I gave over the documents at Bloemfontein and hunted zealously for old friends. Incidentally, through no earthly desire of my own, I came within appreciable distance of going to Pretoria in advance of the Grand Army. But, before the invitation was pressed, a Column-Commander arrived with three pom-poms and, among other things, conveyed my regrets that present engagements did not permit, etc., etc. The last time I had heard anything of that Column-Commander was when they were settling the weights for a Cup which he and another man had given at the Lahore Spring Races of ’86, and the handicapping was level enough to bring all four horses entered into the lottery within fifty rupees of one another. I was exceedingly happy to hear from him again, and more than willing to accept his entries at any weights he chose to declare.

The war in Orange River Colony was supposed to be over, barring a few ‘bill-sticking’ expeditions, but one stuffy, stale evening, outside Bloemfontein, I met a man on a spent horse who told me that he represented Doctor Brydon at Jellalabad, or words to that effect, and passed on, gasping and rocking in the saddle. I gathered from others that a ‘bill-sticking’ expedition had come to grief somewhere out Thabanchu way. Both my friends of the old FIFTH were with or near the Column and I wanted further details. An effusive shop-keeper advised me an hour later that not less than forty thousand Boers were closing in on Bloemfontein after having ‘destroyed the flower of the British Army’ at a place called Sanna’s Post. I knew that flower. It grows weedy in spots, and just then might have been rather ragged; but it is not an easy herb to destroy. At last one of my friends turned up, a little frayed at the edges but otherwise as serene as in the old days at Mian Mir. He said that the affair was not what you might call a success except for the Boers. From a professional point of view he was very pleased with the Boers, and praised, while he explained, their simple tactics at Koornspruit.

‘And so,’ he concluded, ‘that was about all.’

‘But what of The Boy?’ I asked, forgetting that The Boy was a Major.

The Fates had not called The Boy back from Sanna’s Post, and I marvelled, as I listened, at their workings; because that Boy had been my frivolous host at the guest-night when we took tea with the new subaltern, and he who told me the news of The Boy’s death was a pony-training Captain. And now The Boy was dead, and the new-joined subaltern a prisoner at Pretoria, and he who told the tale had commanded expeditions in West Africa and taken columns into Sunnyside and eloped from Ladybrand with the landrost, so to speak, on his saddle-bow, and there we two sat, looking back over the years, in a pea-green hotel at Bloemfontein, listening to the rumble of the ambulances.

‘What are you going to do?’ I asked drearily.

‘I shall try to pull a little of it back later,’ he answered, and passed out into the whirl of dust and khaki. It would have paid the Boers to have killed him early, because he became a column-leader of repute, and did them much well-considered evil for many months.

Next year I was out at the Cape again, and met the news that the old FIFTH had been badly cut up, and that one of the Majors was at a base hospital, wounded. I went to see him for the sake of that first Mess-room dinner and some slight acquaintance after. But the hospitals were under new and very sanitary regulations. A P.M.O. explained them to me. You could not visit without a permit, and you must be accompanied round the wards by an orderly. This was not a visiting day and therefore I could not see my friend. So I did not see him. He recovered and returned to his duty and to his death up country. He had been a prisoner. He was twice, I think, wounded, and at the last he was killed — this man whom I remember with his buttons scarcely out of their tissue-paper, laughing and jesting with The Boy at Mess. I never thought that either of them could die. A convalescent Sergeant in a canteen gave me news of the death next year when I went down South again. He talked of dozens of officers who had joined long after my time; of Sergeant-Majors (and you expect a Sergeant-Major to be fairly permanent) whose names were strange to me; and of a rank and file that had sprung up the day before yesterday. It was like talking to a deaf man in a cemetery, and I felt that the wheel had come full circle, and that the Fates would call me towards THE FIFTH no more.

But who knows? Some time, maybe, our paths will cross again, and I may sit out another guest-night and see the old plate (of which even now I could supply a fairly accurate inventory) and hear the Band and watch the cased Colours, and wonder whether I am awake or dreaming.

I shall take my seat, of course, between Colonels and Majors by virtue of my seniority; but I shall endear myself to the subalterns—the butchas who can stand up and sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ without a quaver—by asking them why their cuff-links and the Mess cigar-lamps are made like old-fashioned shells with little fuses atop, and whether they wear the flash or trim their hats with holly on Christmas Day. I shall discuss Army Reform long and raucously. I shall put plenty of soda-water into my champagne, and I shall go home at 10.15 p.m. (but I shall not try to turn out any Guard by the way), and if anybody asks me whether I have enjoyed myself, I shall say: ‘Not at all. Your ante-room’s too full of ghosts.’

CRICH, THE ORDERLY, sat on a camp-stool cheering Parker, who lay suspiciously quiet. Parker had come from Queensland, via New Jersey, among other cities, and the registered voters of Colesberg had shot him across the spine below the shoulders.

‘My stomach’s a trifle out of order,’ said Parker cheerily. ‘They can’t get it to work. Except for that I don’t feel that there’s anything wrong with me.’

Crich looked at me, to signify that it would b, better for Parker if he had a little more feeling. ‘We’re comin’ on beautifully, ain’t we?’ said Crich, and Parker nodded.

‘I’m the last o’ four—all spinal cases — all in this tent too!’ said Parker. ‘I’ve seen ’em all go, and here am I hangin’ on by my finger-nails. They all went, didn’t they?’

‘Yes,’ said Crich, his braces round his hips; ‘an’ they all called for me ‘fore they went. ‘Member Tommy?

Parker smiled. Sir Philip Sidney smiled very much in that fashion. ‘Oh, yes. I was on special allowance of brandy, but Tommy he always looked for a little of mine in his lemonade.’ Couldn’t speak much, but he used to roll his eyes to my bed. Tommy liked his tot of brandy and lemonade. When did he go, Crich ?’

‘Yes’day afternoon. You was asleep, Parker. He said “Crich, old man, where are you?” he said. “Right here in front o’ you,” I says, and I went up to ‘im, ’cause I knew what was comin’. “I can’t see you, Crich,” he says. Then I laid ‘old of his arms by my two ‘ands. “That’s better,” he says. “If I Can’t see you I can feel you,” he says. “Don’t let go, Crich,” he says, and in a minute or two he was off, as quiet as anything. You was asleep, Parker. Oh, yes, they all asked for old Crich to take ‘old of when they went off Parker’s goin’ to best the lot of ’em.’ Thus to me. ‘Last o’ four spinal cases, he is, an’ he’s goin’ to Netley , an’ he’ll be all right in a few weeks. ‘Ave some more tomatoes, Parker?’

The giant turned his head and raised an arm. He could not quite reach the tomatoes. Crick stepped across the tent, and lavishly douched the cut fruit with oil and vinegar, and exhibited Parker in the act of eating. Then Parker talked of real estate speculations in Orange, New Jersey, and stock-riding in Queensland; Crick supplying an ever-appreciative chorus. I watched the superbly-built body, so all alive to the chest-line, so all dead below, and it seemed to me unfair that nervous anxiety to make Cape Colony a ‘little haven of peace’ had led a ‘neutral Government’ to postpone the ordinary preparations for war till the Colesberg rebels (all registered voters, remember) could conveniently mangle Parker’s spinal cord. I laid it upon Crich, the hairy-chested and adequate, that Parker must not die, and Crich hopefully hopeless said, out of Parker’s hearing, that he would do his damnedest.

That was some weeks ago. I have seen Parker twice or thrice since, but to-day his bed is empty. He has bested the registered voter of Colesberg, all the young doctors who prophesied death, and Crich, who couldn’t see any other way out of it.

He has gone home in a steamer to Netley, with the chance of living, half-dead for a year or two, and the ghost of a chance that he may partially recover. This is a load off my mind. For some absurd reason Parker was my war-fetish. He held on through the black days ere Ladysmith was relieved; he heard of Cronje’s surrender, and now, at Madeira, he will learn that Bloemfontein is his and ours.

The war goes better. With Parker and Bloemfontein disposed of we can attend to the hospitals. Dinniss, the light-moustached Sergeant Major of a Horse battery, has gone away; but not before he saved the lives of three or four depressed and morbid, by his cheerfulness and his yarns.

Dinniss has six-and-twenty years’ service. He refused his majority eleven years ago, because it was not in his beloved battery, and he is an encyclopaedia of military knowledge — the unofficial brand. I heard him tell his tent confidentially that if he had known what sort of a silly sort of war this war was going to turn out, he would have retired on his laurels early in October.

He caught something at Magersfontein, which has kept him in bed for a few weeks, but now he is at the Front again. He was more or less in charge of the Horse battery which, out of pure politeness, stood still to take the Boer fire when our naval gun on the left of the line did not see the flag of truce, went on firing, and brought down a fresh Boer fusillade.

Said Dinniss: ‘Of course, we sat tight to show it was a mistake, but the shells were makin’ our horses skittish, so I said: “Send a driver to their heads. They’re a little shy.” I looked round, an’ there wasn’t any drivers! D’you know what they were doin’ Chasin’ rats round a bush! Yiss! Rat-huntin’ under fire. On my worrud, I don’t believe drivers have sowls. No, not one!’

‘Were they Cockneys, by any chance, Dinniss?’ ‘Ye may say so. We come from St. John’s Wood, London, N.W.’ The tent and the orderlies grieved when Dinniss left, for he had great authority, and most persuasive tact. Now, Derby of the Inniskillings had no authority. He lived on his tongue and his skill in outflanking orderlies. Derby got it badly in the leg, and hopped like a cock robin in scarlet flannel between the tents. He was marked for England, and the day before he sailed all Rondebosch was too small for his transports.

A visitor came by with pipes and tobacco to give the men, and Derby steered him towards a convalescent. ‘D’you want to buy a pipe?’ said Derby with a serious face. ‘They’re only threepence, and the baccy’s one and threepence a stick. It’s dirt cheap.’ The convalescent fingered the stock and demanded cigarettes. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Derby, ‘but we’re sold out of cigarettes. If you’ll give your order, maybe this man will —’ Then the convalescent tumbled to the jest, and Derby had to run for it all between the tent-pegs. There should be lively times on Derby’s boat home, but he is the kindest of souls to an invalid.

The Twins are not on their feet yet. They are both Australians, both have broken legs, they lie side by side, their legs in slings, and the one loyally caps the other’s tallest yarns. A few days back talk turned on what blackfellows could do with a boomerang.

A Fusilier cut to pieces with barbed wire, a 9th Lancer, and a West Yorkshireman told the twins to draw it mild. Sticks could not twist and turn in that way. It was as absurd as the word Woolloomooloo. Entered then from another tent Rae, of Manitoba, hit at Slinger’s or Arundel.

Rae said he did not understand boomerangs, but things could be made to curve in the air, for all the 9th Lancer said. For instance, there was a game called baseball. Rae illustrated with his sound arm how a pitcher sends in a curved ball, and the Twins, applauding, welcomed him as an ally. They had a file of Australian papers with pictures of boomerangs. Would the 9th Lancer please get them out from the shelf, and they would explain. So, under the pines planted in South Africa by men from the North, Welshman,Tyke ,Cockney, and Canadian bent their heads over a Melbourne weekly, while a Queenslander read the letterpress

Johnson, of a Highland regiment — he looked very like Alan Breck had tried to stop a shell-splinter with his stomach, and it cost him eight weeks’ agony. The first time we met he walked crab-fashion, his blue eyes alight with pain. Hear, O Heaven, and bear witness, O Earth, that there would be no more of South Africa for Johnson and his stomach! A fortnight later we sat in the sun with a whispering Guardsman, half of whose larynx had been put out of commission by a down-dropping bullet.

But Johnson was a changed man. He had developed a scheme, and explained it as he sat grasping his ankles and rocking to and fro. They were going to send him to Green Point with other convalescents. The odds were they would send him home, and that did not suit Johnson’s revised book. ‘I’m a saddler by trade. They’ll not overlook the likes of me when they’re repairing collars and harnesses. I’ll not be sent home till the war is over — if I can help it. Surely they’ll need a collar-maker. Then I’ll be able to get back again.’

He went off to draw his kit, walking corkily, and the Guardsman whispered husky congratulations. But there is no spring in McConnell, sergeant of another Highland regiment — nothing but sour disgust. He got it in the hand, round Paardeberg, a rending, shattering bullet, that has marked him for England. And there is what is left of his Company to consider, and there is his unpaid debt to the Boer, drawing interest every day, and there is his right hand throbbing and aching in the night watches. His chief interest is the daily paper and the list of the Boer dead. He lies in his corner, smoking, brooding, and meditating how to escape England. But his hand—his right hand, with the iron-hard forearm — is useless. He always comes back to that.

Not far from him lies Carter, who went downhill by reason of a fractured thigh and some fever.

Then he got bed-sores — two, he told me — and then they got him an air-mattress. Carter came near to losing his life, but the story in the ward is that Neeld, a graceless Cockney Highlander, bucked him up, precisely as Dinniss bucked up the man shot through the lungs.

Anyhow, Carter is spared, which is a sign of grace, and they have taken him out for a small walk in a wheeled chair. ‘He kep’ askin’ us all the way uphill if he was too heavy,’ said one of Carter’s steeds — a convalescent with a head-wound. ‘Well, you see, it’s voluntary, not compulsory, takin’ convalescents out,’ says Carter, rather tremulous about the mouth.

‘You don’t weigh more’n a rat now,’ is the answer, and then, the voice touched with a beautiful tenderness, ‘Did ye like it, ‘Arry?’

Did he like it? After three months he has seen trees and sunshine, and felt the big sky above him. He picked up the good dirt of the earth and let it run through his fingers. Now he is going to sleep. In a little while Mylton will be fit to wheel out. He hails from St. John, New Brunswick — the old city of many fires over against the racing Fundy tide. The scent of the Wynberg pine-needles makes him one jelly of home-sickness. Providence sent to his bedside one who knows his city, and street by street and suburb by suburb, ‘from Castor in the Forum to Mars without the wall’—from the fragrant lumber-mills to Loch Lomond. Mylton goes over it all rejoicing. Yes, he knows, moreover, Dalhousie, Gaspe, and Baie Chaleur. And how he longs to see them! Two yards away a Yorkshire Reservist points out to a man who is fashioning a canvas and wool belt that of all places under heaven there is none like to Bradford. He is married, with four children and a damaged shoulder; but all will be well when he returns to Bradford, ‘in t’ steamer.’

Lascelles, Tasmanian Mounted Infantry, holds quite other views. He had come through much rough-and-tumble work, ending with abscess of the liver. That removed, they have put him to light duty at Maitland Camp till he is fit to sit a horse. His eyes are sunk and heavy, but he sees far. He is the son of a Hobart fruitgrower. What about fruit-growing in this country? Is himself an apple man, but understands peaches and plums. Has noticed while in hospital that many apples sent to convalescents were full of codlin-grub, which he considers far more serious than Boers.

What about red-scale and the other fruit-pests? What about packing and freight-rates? In Tasmania the wood for an apple-crate costs threepence halfpenny, and the completed article less than fivepence. On the other hand, South Africa is nearer London than Hobart. Lascelles works out the sum in his head, and emerges to say that he has dug up many samples of soil round Kimberley; has also looked over many farms up-country as he rode through.

Lascelles thinks that Tasmania being a small place — a young man might do worse than settle here and grow up in a new country, eh? It is represented to Lascelles that he is the kind of man we need badly. Yes, Mr. Lascelles, this is the one land for the new man of colonial experience — for open-air men used to large spaces and plain living – thousands of them. Here is everything — horses, cattle, wool, and fruit. Do you know any more young men of the same views Manitoba ranchers, New Zealand sheep-men, fruitgrowers of the South?

If so, bring them along, and we will make such a country as the world has never seen. Lascelles admits that he has talked to several friends about the wisdom of settling here after the war. They think well of it. In twenty minutes I have pledged the honour of the Empire to the hilt on behalf of Lascelles & Co. If they mean business everything shall be made easy for their first start. I will lend them money on mortgage (at least, you will, and we shall get four per cent on it). I will slap down railways along the valleys where the fruit grows, so that no farm need haul her dried prunes more than five miles to the rail. (This is not so mad as it sounds, for such valleys are few.)

I will arrange low freights, if I have to go on my knees to German shipping firms. I will break the Covent Garden fruit-ring into flinders. I will erect coldstorage warehouses by the acre, and chilled fruit-cars at 40° uniform shall be as common as cattle-trucks on all our lines. I will develop under the care of half-a-dozen picked Canal officers from India such a scheme of irrigation (it will not cost more than three millions to begin with) as shall beat the Bara Doab, Colorado, and the Queensland colonies combined.

Mr. Lascelles accepts everything calmly. He is young and has the divine faith. ‘In twenty years’ time!’ he says, and his eye with a budding stye on it glows.

‘Ah, but it’s all a gamble,’ I make haste to qualify. ‘One has to take one’s chances.’

‘I’ll take ’em,’ says Mr. Lascelles; and, when you come to think of it, a man who has been risking his life for a few weeks is not going to be deterred by the prospect of one fruit farm or a score, for that matter failing on Iris hands.

Meantime, will you please take notes of the few schemes I have committed you to? Because in five years you will be lending money on them and they will pay more than trappy gold-reefs or South American tramways. The tents arc full of boys who, with a little steering, would settle here. Nixon, of Vancouver, for instance, is in real estate and life insurance when he is at home. He was also in the Canadian rush on the Paardeberg laager. Being a youth of cheerful and speculative temperament, he would be shrewd enough to pronounce on the chances of a new country if any one brought him the facts and the figures — and the fancies. As it is, lie lies in bed with a bullet through his leg and thinks about a Vancouver girl. Colliss, also a Western man in real estate, would be another splendid recruit. He shed his blood for the country with a vengeance, the bullet narrowly missing an artery. He would stay in the country if properly approached. He is sinful proud of the fact that of eight hundred and fifty Canadians engaged in this business not more than four hundred and sixty are at this date available. And they were not cut down by sickness nor cut off by Boer patrols. We may assume, then, that among the hospitals are three hundred Canadians of the very stamp and breed we require — young, sound, clean, intelligent, well educated, of whom seventy-five per cent hold or have held land. Three hundred possible heads of sane and soaped families. And not a man to show them maps and photos and plans to lure them to stay in South Africa. We shall let all these beautiful men, and hundreds and hundreds more, go back to their own place and never lift finger to stay them. Truly we are the most wasteful as we are the most idle nation under heaven!

Derby, and Dinniss, and Crich, and Neeld, and Johnson, and the young postman at Crieff, and my own postman at Rottingdean (he is here in a bearer company), and the man that drives the big brewery wagon at Newhaven (he is here in the Black Watch, and was hit at Magersfontein), must go home when the war is ended. Blessings and thanks go with them. They are all either Reserve men, their places waiting for them, or men of the Regular Line without a trade.

But we need Mylton when he gets better, and Nixon, and Colliss, and Lascelles, and the Twins, and a few thousand more of their kidney to stay and inherit.

For the land is a good land. It has been wilfully and wickedly starved — starved by policy and craft through many years lest an incompetent race should be found out before the face of the nations.

RUDYARD KIPLING

(The Kipling Society presents here Kipling’s work as he
wrote it, but wishes to alert readers that the text below
contains some derogatory and/or offensive language)

page 1 of 7

‘He that believeth shall not make haste.’—Isaiah.

THE guard-boat lay across the mouth of the bathing-pool, her crew idly spanking the water with the flat of their oars. A red-coated militiaman, rifle in hand, sat at the bows, and a petty officer at the stern. Between the snow-white cutter and the flat-topped, honey-coloured rocks on the beach the green water was troubled with shrimp-pink prisoners-of-war bathing. Behind their orderly tin camp and the electric-light poles rose those stone-dotted spurs that throw heat on Simonstown. Beneath them the little Barracouta nodded to the big Gibraltar, and the old Penelope, that in ten years has been bachelors’ club, natural history museum, kindergarten, and prison, rooted and dug at her fixed moorings. Far out, a threefunnelled Atlantic transport with turtle bow and stern waddled in from the deep sea.Said the sentry, assured of the visitor’s good faith, ‘Talk to ’em? You can, to any that speak English. You’ll find a lot that do.’

Here and there earnest groups gathered round ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church, who doubtless preached conciliation, but the majority preferred their bath. The God who Looks after Small Things had caused the visitor that day to receive two weeks’ delayed mails in one from a casual postman, and the whole heavy bundle of newspapers, tied with a strap, he dangled as bait. At the edge of the beach, cross-legged, undressed to his sky-blue army shirt, sat a lean, ginger-haired man, on guard over a dozen heaps of clothing. His eyes followed the incoming Atlantic boat.

‘Excuse me, Mister,’ he said, without turning (and the speech betrayed his nationality), ‘would you mind keeping away from these garments? I’ve been elected janitor—on the Dutch vote.’

The visitor moved over against the barbedwire fence and sat down to his mail. At the rustle of the newspaper-wrappers the ginger-coloured man turned quickly, the hunger of a press-ridden people in his close-set iron-grey eyes.

‘Have you any use for papers?’ said the visitor.

‘Have I any use? ‘A quick, curved forefinger was already snicking off the outer covers. ‘Why, that’s the New York postmark! Give me the ads. at the back of Harper’s and M’Clure’s and I’m in touch with God’s Country again! Did you know how I was aching for papers? ‘

The visitor told the tale of the casual postman.

‘Providential!’ said the ginger-coloured man, keen as a terrier on his task; ‘both in time and matter. Yes ! . . . The Scientific American yet once more! Oh, it’s good! it’s good!’ His voice broke as he pressed his hawk-like nose against the heavily-inked patent-specifications at the end. ‘Can I keep it? I thank you—I thank you! Why—why—well—well! The American Tyler of all things created! Do you subscribe to that?’

‘I’m on the free list,’ said the visitor, nodding. He extended his blue-tanned hand with that air of Oriental spaciousness which distinguishes the native-born American, and met the visitor’s grasp expertly. ‘I can only say that you have treated me like a Brother (yes, I’ll take every last one you can spare), and if ever—’ He plucked at the bosom of his shirt. ’Psha! I forgot I’d no card on me; but my name’s Zigler—Laughton O. Zigler. An American? If Ohio’s still in the Union, I am, Sir. But I’m no extreme States’rights man. I’ve used all of my native country and a few others as I have found occasion, and now I am the captive of your bow and spear. I’m not kicking at that. I am not a coerced alien, nor a naturalised Texas mule-tender, nor an adventurer on the instalment plan. I don’t tag after our Consul when he comes around, expecting the American Eagle to lift me out o’ this by the slack of my pants. No, Sir! If a Britisher went into Indian Territory and shot up his surroundings with a Colt automatic (not that she’s any sort of weapon, but I take her for an illustration), he’d be strung up quicker’n a snowflake ’ud melt in hell. No ambassador of yours ’ud save him. I’m my neck ahead on this game, anyway. That’s how I regard the proposition.

‘Have I gone gunning against the British? To a certain extent. I presume you never heard tell of the Laughton-Zigler automatic two-inch field-gun, with self-feeding hopper, single oil-cylinder recoil, and ballbearing gear throughout? Or Laughtite, the new explosive? Absolutely uniform in effect, and one-ninth the bulk of any present effete charge—flake, cannonite, cordite, troisdorf, cellulose, cocoa, cord, or prism—I don’t care what it is. Laughtite’s immense; so’s the Zigler automatic. It’s me. It’s fifteen years of me. You are not a gun-sharp? I am sorry. I could have surprised you. Apart from my gun, my tale don’t amount to much of anything. I thank you, but I don’t use any tobacco you’d be likely to carry . . . Bull Durham? Bull Durham! I take it all back-every last word. Bull Durham-here! If ever you strike Akron, Ohio, when this fool-war’s over, remember you’ve Laughton O. Zigler in your vest pocket. Including the city of Akron. We’ve a little club there . . . Hell! What’s the sense of talking Akron with no pants?

‘My gun? . . . For two cents I’d have shipped her to our Filipeens. ’Came mighty near it too; but from what I’d read in the papers, you can’t trust Aguinaldo’s crowd on scientific matters. Why don’t I offer it to our army? Well, you’ve an effete aristocracy running yours, and we’ve a crowd of politicians. The results are practically identical. I am not taking any U.S. Army in mine.

‘I went to Amsterdam with her—to this Dutch junta that supposes it’s bossing the war. I wasn’t brought up to love the British for one thing, and for another I knew that if she got in her fine work (my gun) I’d stand more chance of receiving an unbiassed report from a crowd o’ dam-fool British officers than from a hatful of politicians’ nephews doing duty as commissaries and ordnance sharps. As I said, I put the brown man out of the question. That’s the way I regarded the proposition.

‘The Dutch in Holland don’t amount to a row of pins. Maybe I misjudge ’em. Maybe they’ve been swindled too often by self-seeking adventurers to know a enthusiast when they see him. Anyway, they’re slower than the Wrath o’ God. But on delusions—as to their winning out next Thursday week at 9 a.m.—they are—if I may say so—quite British.

‘I’ll tell you a curious thing, too. I fought ’em for ten days before I could get the financial side of my game fixed to my liking. I knew they didn’t believe in the Zigler, but they’d no call to be crazy-mean. I fixed it—free passage and freight for me and the gun to Delagoa Bay, and beyond by steam and rail. Then I went aboard to see her crated, and there I struck my fellow-passengers—all deadheads, same as me. Well, Sir, I turned in my tracks where I stood and besieged the ticket-office, and I said, “Look at here, Van Dunk. I’m paying for my passage and her room in the hold-every square and cubic foot.” ’Guess he knocked down the fare to himself ; but I paid. I paid. I wasn’t going to deadhead along o’ that crowd of Pentecostal sweepings. ’Twould have hoodooed my gun for all time. That was the way I regarded the proposition. No, Sir, they were not pretty company.

‘When we struck Pretoria I had a hell-and-a-half of a time trying to interest the Dutch vote in my gun an’ her potentialities. The bottom was out of things rather much just about that time. Kruger was praying some and stealing some, and the Hollander lot was singing, “If you haven’t any money you needn’t come round.” Nobody was spending his dough on anything except tickets to Europe: We were both grossly neglected. When I think how I used to give performances in the public streets with dummy cartridges, filling the hopper and turning the handle till the sweat dropped off me, I blush, Sir. I’ve made her do her stunts before Kaffirs—naked sons of Ham—in Commissioner Street, trying to get a holt somewhere.

page 2

‘Did I talk? I despise exaggeration—’tain’t American or scientific—but as true as I’m sitting here like a blue-ended baboon in a kloof, Teddy Roosevelt’s Western tour was a maiden’s sigh compared to my advertising work.

‘’Long in the spring I was rescued by a commandant called Van Zyl—a big, fleshy man with a lame leg. Take away his hair and his gun and he’d make a first-class Schenectady bar-keep. He found me and the Zigler on the veldt (Pretoria wasn’t wholesome at that time), and he annexed me in a somnambulistic sort o’ way. He was dead against the war from the start, but, being a Dutchman, he fought a sight better than the rest of that “God and the Mauser” outfit. Adrian Van Zyl. Slept a heap in the daytime—and didn’t love niggers. I liked him. I was the only foreigner in his commando. The rest was Georgia Crackers and Pennsylvania Dutch—with a dash o’ Philadelphia lawyer. I could tell you things about them would surprise you. Religion for one thing; women for another; but I don’t know as their notions o’ geography weren’t the craziest. ’Guess that must be some sort of automatic compensation. There wasn’t one blamed ant-hill in their district they didn’t know and use; but the world was flat, they said, and England was a day’s trek from Cape Town.

‘They could fight in their own way, and don’t you forget it. But I guess you will not. They fought to kill, and, by what I could make out, the British fought to be killed. So both parties were accommodated.

‘I am the captive of your bow and spear, Sir. The position has its obligations—on both sides. You could not be offensive or partisan to me. I cannot, for the same reason, be offensive to you. Therefore I will not give you my opinions on the conduct of your war.

‘Anyway, I didn’t take the field as an offensive partisan, but as an inventor. It was a condition and not a theory that confronted me. (Yes, Sir, I’m a Democrat by conviction, and that was one of the best things Grover Cleveland ever got off.)

‘After three months’ trek, old man Van Zyl had his commando in good shape and refitted off the British, and he reckoned he’d wait on a British General of his acquaintance that did business on a circuit between Stompiesneuk, Jackhalputs, Vrelegen, and Odendaalstroom, year in and year out. He was a fixture in that section.

‘“He’s a dam good man,” says Van Zyl. “He’s a friend of mine. He sent in a fine doctor when I was wounded and our Hollander doc. wanted to cut my leg off. Ya, I’ll guess we’ll stay with him.” Up to date, me and my Zigler had lived in innocuous desuetude owing to little odds and ends riding out of gear. How in thunder was I to know there wasn’t the ghost of any road in the country? But raw hide’s cheap and lastin’. I guess I’ll make my next gun a thousand pounds heavier, though.

‘Well, Sir, we struck the General on his beat—Vrelegen it was—and our crowd opened with the usual compliments at two thousand yards. Van Zyl shook himself into his greasy old saddle and says, “Now we shall be quite happy, Mr. Zigler. No more trekking. Joost twelve miles a day till the apricots are ripe.”

‘Then we hitched on to his outposts, and vedettes, and Cossack-picquets, or whatever they was called, and we wandered around the veldt arm in arm like brothers.

‘The way we worked lodge was this way. The General, he had his breakfast at 8.45 a.m. to the tick. He might have been a Long Island commuter. At 8.42 a.m. I’d go down to the Thirty-fourth Street ferry to meet him—I mean I’d see the Zigler into position at two thousand (I began at three thousand, but that was cold and distant)—and blow him off to two full hoppers—eighteen rounds just as they were bringing in his coffee. If his crowd was busy celebrating the anniversary of Waterloo or the last royal kid’s birthday, they’d open on me with two guns (I’ll tell you about them later on), but if they were disengaged they’d all stand to their horses and pile on the ironmongery, and washers, and typewriters, and five weeks’ grub, and in half an hour they’d sail out after me and the rest of Van Zyl’s boys; lying down and firing till 11.45 a.m. or maybe high noon. Then we’d go from labour to refreshment, resooming at 2 p.m. and battling till tea-time. Tuesday and Friday was the General’s moving days. He’d trek ahead ten or twelve miles, and we’d loaf around his flankers and exercise the ponies a piece. Sometimes he’d get hung up in a drift—stalled crossin’ a crick—and we’d make playful snatches at his wagons. First time that happened I turned the Zigler loose with high hopes, Sir; but the old man was well posted on rearguards with a gun to ’em, and I had to haul her out with three mules instead o’ six. I was pretty mad. I wasn’t looking for any experts back of the Royal British Artillery. Otherwise, the game was mostly even. He’d lay out three or four of our commando, and we’d gather in four or five of his once a week or thereon. One time, I remember, ’long towards dusk we saw ’em burying five of their boys. They stood pretty thick around the graves. We wasn’t more than fifteen hundred yards off, but old Van Zyl wouldn’t fire. He just took off his hat at the proper time. He said if you stretched a man at his prayers you’d have to hump his bad luck before the Throne as well as your own. I am inclined to agree with him. So we browsed along week in and week out. A war-sharp might have judged it sort of docile, but for an inventor needing practice one day and peace the next for checking his theories, it suited Laughton O. Zigler.

‘And friendly? Friendly was no word for it. We was brothers in arms.

‘Why, I knew those two guns of the Royal British Artillery as well as I used to know the old Fifth Avenoo stages. They might have been brothers too.

‘They’d jolt into action, and wiggle around and skid and spit and cough and prise ’emselves back again during our hours of bloody battle till I could have wept, Sir, at the spectacle of modern white men chained up to these old handpower, back-number, flint-and-steel reaping machines. One of ’em—I called her Baldy—she’d a long white scar all along her barrel—I’d made sure of twenty times. I knew her crew by sight, but she’d come switching and teetering out of the dust of my shells like—like a hen from under a buggy—and she’d dip into a gully, and next thing I’d know ’ud be her old nose peeking over the ridge sniffin’ for us. Her runnin’ mate had two grey mules in the lead, and a natural wood wheel repainted, and a whole raft of rope-ends trailin’ around. ’J’ever see Tom Reed with his vest off, steerin’ Congress through a heat-wave? I’ve been to Washington often—too often—filin’ my patents. I called her Tom Reed. We three ’ud play pussy-wants-a-corner all round the outposts on off-days—cross-lots through the sage and along the mezas till we was short-circuited by canons. Oh, it was great for me and Baldy and Tom Reed! I don’t know as we didn’t neglect the legitimate interests of our respective commandoes sometimes for this ball-play. I know I did.

‘’Long towards the fall the Royal British Artillery grew shy—hung back in their breeching sort of—and their shooting was way—way off. I observed they wasn’t taking any chances, not though I acted kitten almost underneath ’em.

‘I mentioned it to Van Zyl, because it struck me I had about knocked their Royal British morale endways.

‘“No,” says he, rocking as usual on his pony. “My Captain Mankeltow he is sick. That is all.”

‘“So’s your Captain Mankeltow’s guns,” I said. “But I’m going to make ’em a heap sicker before he gets well.”

page 3

‘“No,” says Van Zyl. “He has had the enteric a little. Now he is better, and he was let out from hospital at Jackhalputs. Ah, that Mankeltow! He always makes me laugh so. I told him—long back—at Colesberg, I had a little home for him at Nooitgedacht. But he would not come—no! He has been sick, and I am sorry.”

‘“How d’you know that?” I says.

‘“Why, only to-day he sends back his love by Johanna Van der Merwe, that goes to their doctor for her sick baby’s eyes. He sends his love, that Mankeltow, and he tells her tell me he has a little garden of roses all ready for me in the Dutch Indies—Umballa. He is very funny, my Captain Mankeltow.”

‘The Dutch and the English ought to fraternise, Sir. They’ve the same notions of humour, to my thinking.’

‘“When he gets well,” says Van Zyl, “you look out, Mr. Americaan. He comes back to his guns next Tuesday. Then they shoot better.”

‘I wasn’t so well acquainted with the Royal British Artillery as old man Van Zyl. I knew this Captain Mankeltow by sight, of course, and, considering what sort of a man with the hoe he was, I thought he’d done right well against my Zigler. But nothing epoch-making.

‘Next morning at the usual hour I waited on the General, and old Van Zyl come along with some of the boys. Van Zyl didn’t hang round the Zigler much as a rule, but this was his luck that day.

‘He was peeking through his glasses at the camp, and I was helping pepper the General’s sow-belly-just as usual-when he turns to me quick and says, “Almighty! How all these Englishmen are liars! You cannot trust one,” he says. “Captain Mankeltow tells our Johanna he comes not back till Tuesday, and to-day is Friday, and there he is! Almighty! The English are all Chamberlains!”

‘If the old man hadn’t stopped to make political speeches he’d have had his supper in laager that night, I guess. I was busy attending to Tom Reed at two thousand when Baldy got in her fine work on me. I saw one sheet of white flame wrapped round the hopper, and in the middle of it there was one o’ my mules straight on end. Nothing out of the way in a mule on end, but this mule hadn’t any head. I remember it struck me as incongruous at the time, and when I’d ciphered it out I was doing the Santos-Dumont act without any balloon and my motor out of gear. Then I got to thinking about Santos-Dumont and how much better my new way was. Then I thought about Professor Langley and the Smithsonian, and wished I hadn’t lied so extravagantly in some of my specifications at Washington. Then I quit thinking for quite a while, and when I resumed my train of thought I was nude, Sir, in a very stale stretcher, and my mouth was full of fine dirt all flavoured with Laughtite.

‘I coughed up that dirt.

‘“Hullo!” says a man walking beside me. “You’ve spoke almost in time. Have a drink?”

‘I don’t use rum as a rule, but I did then, because I needed it.

‘“What hit us? “I said.

‘“Me,” he said. “I got you fair on the hopper as you pulled out of that donga; but I’m sorry to say every last round in the hopper’s exploded and your gun’s in a shocking state. I’m real sorry,” he says. “I admire your gun, Sir.”

‘“Are you Captain Mankeltow?” I says.

‘“Yes,” he says. “I presoom you’re Mister Zigler. Your commanding officer told me about you.”

‘“Have you gathered in old man Van Zyl?” I said.

‘“Commandant Van Zyl,” he says very stiff, “was most unfortunately wounded, but I am glad to say it’s not serious. We hope he’ll be able to dine with us to-night; and I feel sure,” he says, “the General would be delighted to see you too, though he didn’t expect,” he says, “and no one else either, by Jove!” he says, and blushed like the British do when they’re embarrassed.

‘I saw him slide an Episcopalian Prayer-book up his sleeve, and when I looked over the edge of the stretcher there was half-a-dozen enlisted men—privates—had just quit digging and was standing to attention by their spades. I guess he was right on the General not expecting me to dinner; but it was all of a piece with their sloppy British way of doing business. Any God’s quantity of fuss and flubdub to bury a man, and not an ounce of forehandedness in the whole outfit to find out whether he was rightly dead. And I am a Congregationalist anyway !

‘Well, Sir, that was my introduction to the British Army. I’d write a book about it if anyone would believe me. This Captain Mankeltow, Royal British Artillery, turned the doctor on me (I could write another book about him) and fixed me up with a suit of his own clothes, and fed me canned beef and biscuits, and give me a cigar—a Henry Clay and a whisky-and-sparklet. He was a white man.

‘“Ye-es, by Jove,” he said, dragging out his words like a twist of molasses, “we’ve all admired your gun and the way you’ve worked it. Some of us betted you was a British deserter. I won a sovereign on that from a yeoman. And, by the way,” he says, “you’ve disappointed me groom pretty bad.”

‘“Where does your groom come in?” I said.

‘“Oh, he was the yeoman. He’s a dam poor groom,” says my captain, “but he’s a way-up barrister when he’s at home. He’s been running around the camp with his tongue out, waiting for the chance of defending you at the court-martial.”

‘“What court-martial?” I says.

‘“On you as a deserter from the Artillery. You’d have had a good run for your money. Anyway, you’d never have been hung after the way you worked your gun. Deserter ten times over,” he says, “I’d have stuck out for shooting you like a gentleman.”

‘Well, Sir, right there it struck me at the pit of my stomach—sort of sickish, sweetish feeling—that my position needed regularising pretty bad. I ought to have been a naturalised burgher of a year’s standing; but Ohio’s my State, and I wouldn’t have gone back on her for a desertful of Dutchmen. That and my enthoosiasm as an inventor had led me to the existing crisis; but I couldn’t expect this Captain Mankeltow to regard the proposition that way. There I sat, the rankest breed of unreconstructed American citizen, caught red-handed squirting hell at the British Army for months on end. I tell you, Sir, I wished I was in Cincinnatah that summer evening. I’d have compromised on Brooklyn.

page 4

‘“What d’you do about aliens?” I said, and the dirt I’d coughed up seemed all back of my tongue again.

‘“Oh,” says he, “we don’t do much of anything. They’re about all the society we get. I’m a bit of a pro-Boer myself,” he says, “but between you and me the average Boer ain’t over and above intellectual. You’re the first American we’ve met up with, but of course you’re a burgher.”

‘It was what I ought to have been if I’d had the sense of a common tick, but the way he drawled it out made me mad.

‘“Of course I am not,” I says. “Would you be a naturalised Boer?”

‘“I’m fighting against ’em,” he says, lighting a cigarette, “but it’s all a matter of opinion.”

‘“Well,” I says, “you can hold any blame opinion you choose, but I’m a white man, and my present intention is to die in that colour.”

‘He laughed one of those big, thick-ended, British laughs that don’t lead anywhere, and whacked up some sort of compliment about America that made me mad all through.

‘I am the captive of your bow and spear, Sir, but I do not understand the alleged British joke. It is depressing.

‘I was introdooced to five or six officers that evening, and every blame one of ’em grinned and asked me why I wasn’t in the Filipeens suppressing our war! And that was British humour! They all had to get it off their chests before they’d talk sense. But they was sound on the Zigler. They had all admired her. I made out a fairystory of me being wearied of the war, and having pushed the gun at them these last three months in the hope they’d capture it and let me go home. That tickled ’em to death. They made me say it three times over, and laughed like kids each time. But half the British are kids; specially the older men. My Captain Mankeltow was less of it than the others. He talked about the Zigler like a lover, Sir, and I drew him diagrams of the hopperfeed and recoil-cylinder in his note-book. He asked the one British question I was waiting for, “Hadn’t I made my working-parts too light?” The British think weight’s strength.

‘At last—I’d been shy of opening the subject before—at last I said, “Gentlemen, you are the unprejudiced tribunal I’ve been hunting after. I guess you ain’t interested in any other gun-factory, and politics don’t weigh with you. How did it feel your end of the game? What’s my gun done, anyway?”

‘“I hate to disappoint you,” says Captain Mankeltow, “because I know how you feel as an inventor.” I wasn’t feeling like an inventor just then. I felt friendly, but the British haven’t more tact than you can pick up with a knife out of a plate of soup.

‘“The honest truth,” he says, “is that you’ve wounded about ten of us one way and another, killed two battery horses and four mules, and—oh, yes,” he said, “you’ve bagged five Kaffirs. But, buck up,” he says, “we’ve all had mighty close calls”—shaves, he called ’em, I remember. “Look at my pants.”

‘They was repaired right across the seat with Minneapolis flour-bagging. I could see the stencil.

‘“I ain’t bluffing,” he says. “Get the hospital returns, Doc.”

‘The doctor gets ’em and reads ’em out under the proper dates. That doctor alone was worth the price of admission.

‘I was pleased right through that I hadn’t killed any of these cheerful kids; but none the less I couldn’t help thinking that a few more Kaffirs would have served me just as well for advertising purposes as white men. No, Sir. Anywhichway you regard the proposition, twenty-one casualties after months of close friendship like ours was—paltry.

‘They gave me taffy about the gun—the British use taffy where we use sugar. It’s cheaper, and gets there just the same. They sat around and proved to me that my gun was too good, too uniform—shot as close as a Männlicher rifle.

‘Says one kid chewing a bit of grass: “I counted eight of your shells, Sir, burst in a radius of ten feet. All of ’em would have gone through one waggon-tilt. It was beautiful,” he says. “It was too good.”

‘I shouldn’t wonder if the boys were right. My Laughtite is too mathematically uniform in propelling power. Yes; she was too good for this refractory fool of a country. The training-gear was broke, too, and we had to swivel her around by the trail. But I’ll build my next Zigler fifteen hundred pounds heavier. Might work in a gasoline motor under the axles. I must think that up.

‘“Well, gentlemen,” I said, “I’d hate to have been the death of any of you; and if a prisoner can deed away his property, I’d love to present the Captain here with what he’s seen fit to leave of my Zigler.”

‘“Thanks awf’ly,” says my Captain. “I’d like her very much. She’d look fine in the mess at Woolwich. That is, if you don’t mind, Mr. Zigler.”

‘“Go right ahead,” I says. “I’ve come out of all the mess I’ve any use for; but she’ll do to spread the light among the Royal British Artillery.”

‘I tell you, Sir, there’s not much of anything the matter with the Royal British Artillery. They’re brainy men languishing under an effete system which, when you take good holt of it, is England just all England. ’Times I’d feel I was talking with real live citizens, and times I’d feel I’d struck the Beef-eaters in the Tower.

‘How? Well, this way. I was telling my Captain Mankeltow what Van Zyl had said about the British being all Chamberlains when the old man saw him back from hospital four days ahead of time.

‘“Oh, dam it all!” he says, as serious as the Supreme Court. “It’s too bad,” he says. “Johanna must have misunderstood me, or else I’ve got the wrong Dutch word for these blarsted days of the week. I told Johanna I’d be out on Friday. The woman’s a fool. Oah, da-am it all!” he says. “I wouldn’t have sold old Van Zyl a pup like that,” he says. “I’ll hunt him up and apologise.”

‘He must have fixed it all right, for when we sailed over to the General’s dinner my Captain had Van Zyl about half-full of sherry and bitters, as happy as a clam. The boys all called him Adrian, and treated him like their prodigal father. He’d been hit on the collar-bone by a wad of shrapnel, and his arm was tied up.

‘But the General was the peach. I presume you’re acquainted with the average run of British generals, but this was my first. I sat on his left hand, and he talked like—like the Ladies’ Home Journal. ’J’ever read that paper? It’s refined, Sir—and innocuous, and full of nickel-plated sentiments guaranteed to improve the mind. He was it. He began by a Lydia Pinkham heart-to-heart talk about my health, and hoped the boys had done me well, and that I was enjoying my stay in their midst. Then he thanked me for the interesting and valuable lessons that I’d given his crowd—specially in the matter of placing artillery and

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rearguard attacks. He’d wipe his long thin moustache between drinks—lime-juice and water he used—and blat off into a long “a-aah,” and ladle out more taffy for me or old man Van Zyl on his right. I told him how I’d had my first Pisgah-sight of the principles of the Zigler when I was a fourth-class postmaster on a star-route in Arkansas. I told him how I’d worked it up by instalments when I was machinist in Waterbury, where the dollar-watches come from. He had one on his wrist then. I told him how I’d met Zalinski (he’d never heard of Zalinski!) when I was an extra clerk in the Naval Construction Bureau at Washington. I told him how my uncle, who was a truck-farmer in Noo Jersey (he loaned money on mortgage too, for ten acres ain’t enough now m Noo Jersey), how he’d willed me a quarter of a million dollars, because I was the only one of our kin that called him down when he used to come home with a hard-cider jag on him and heave ox-bows at his nieces. I told him how I’d turned in every red cent on the Zigler, and I told him the whole circus of my coming out with her, and so on, and so following; and every forty seconds he’d wipe his moustache and blat, “How interesting. Really, now? How interesting.”

‘It was like being in an old English book, Sir. Like Bracebridge Hall. But an American wrote that! I kept peeking around for the Boar’s Head and the Rosemary and Magna Charta and the Cricket on the Hearth, and the rest of the outfit. Then Van Zyl whirled in. He was no ways jagged, but thawed—thawed, Sir, and among friends. They began discussing previous scraps all along the old man’s beat—about sixty of ’em—as well as side-shows with other generals and columns. Van Zyl told ’im of a big beat he’d worked on a column a week or so before I’d joined him. He demonstrated his strategy with forks on the table.

‘“There!” said the General, when he’d finished. “That proves my contention to the hilt. Maybe I’m a bit of a pro-Boer, but I stick to it,” he says, “that under proper officers, with due regard to his race prejudices, the Boer ’ud make the finest mounted infantry in the Empire. Adrian,” he says, “you’re simply squandered on a cattle-run. You ought to be at the Staff College with De Wet.”

‘“You catch De Wet and I come to your Staff College—eh,” says Adrian, laughing. “But you are so slow, Generaal. Why are you so slow? For a month,” he says, “you do so well and strong that we say we shall hands-up and come back to our farms. Then you send to England and make us a present of two—three—six hundred young men, with rifles and wagons and rum and tobacco, and such a great lot of cartridges, that our young men put up their tails and start all over again. If you hold an ox by the horn and hit him by the bottom he runs round and round. He never goes anywhere. So, too, this war goes round and round. You know that, Generaal!”

‘“Quite right, Adrian,” says the General ; “but you must believe your Bible.”

‘“Hooh!” says Adrian, and reaches for the whisky. I’ve never known a Dutchman a professing Atheist, but some few have been rather active Agnostics since the British sat down in Pretoria. Old man Van Zyl—he told me—had soured on religion after Bloemfontein surrendered. He was a Free Stater for one thing.

‘“He that believeth,” says the General, “shall not make haste. That’s in Isaiah. We believe we’re going to win, and so we don’t make haste. As far as I’m concerned I’d like this war to last another five years. We’d have an army then. It’s just this way, Mr. Zigler,” he says, “our people are brim-full of patriotism, but they’ve been born and brought up between houses, and England ain’t big enough to train ’em—not if you expect to preserve.”

‘“Preserve what?” I says. “England?”

‘“No. The game,” he says; “and that reminds me, gentlemen, we haven’t drunk the King and Fox-hunting.”

‘So they drank the King and Fox-hunting. I drank the King because there’s something about Edward that tickles me (he’s so blame British); but I rather stood out on the Fox-hunting. I’ve ridden wolves in the cattle-country, and needed a drink pretty bad afterwards, but it never struck me as I ought to drink about it—he-red-it-arily.

‘“No, as I was saying, Mr. Zigler,” he goes on, “we have to train our men in the field to shoot and ride. I allow six months for it; but many column-commanders—not that I ought to say a word against ’em, for they’re the best fellows that ever stepped, and most of ’em are my dearest friends—seem to think that if they have men and horses and guns they can take tea with the Boers. It’s generally the other way about, ain’t it, Mr. Zigler?”

‘“To some extent, Sir,” I said.

‘“I’m so glad you agree with me,” he says. “My command here I regard as a training depot, and you, if I may say so, have been one of my most efficient instructors. I mature my men slowly but thoroughly. First I put ’em in a town which is liable to be attacked by night, where they can attend riding-school in the day. Then I use ’em with a convoy, and last I put ’em into a column. It takes time,” he says, “but I flatter myself that any men who have worked under me are at least grounded in the rudiments of their profession. Adrian,” he says, “was there anything wrong with the men who upset Van Besters’ applecart last month when he was trying to cross the line to join Piper with those horses he’d stole from Gabbitas?”

‘“No, Generaal,” says Van Zyl. “Your men got the horses back and eleven dead; and Van Besters, he ran to Delarey in his shirt. They was very good, those men. They shoot hard.”

‘“So pleased to hear you say so. I laid ’em down at the beginning of this century—a 1900 vintage. You remember ’em, Mankletow?” he says. “The Central Middlesex Broncho Busters—clerks and floor-walkers mostly,” and he wiped his moustache. “It was just the same with the Liverpool Buckjumpers, but they were stevedores. Let’s see—they were a last-century draft, weren’t they? They did well after nine months. You know ’em, Van Zyl? You didn’t get much change out of ’em at Pootfontein?”

‘“No,” says Van Zyl. “At Pootfontein I lost my son Andries.”

‘“I beg your pardon, Commandant,” says the General ; and the rest of the crowd sort of cooed over Adrian.

‘“Excoose,” says Adrian. “It was all right. They were good men those, but it is just what I say. Some are so dam good we want to hands-up, and some are so dam bad, we say, ‘Take the Vierkleur into Cape Town.’ It is not upright of you, Generaal. It is not upright of you at all. I do not think you ever wish this war to finish.”

‘“It’s a first-class dress-parade for Armageddon,” says the General. “With luck, we ought to run half a million men through the mill. Why, we might even be able to give our Native Army a look in. Oh, not here, of course, Adrian, but down in the Colony—say a camp-of-exercise at Worcester. You mustn’t be prejudiced, Adrian. I’ve commanded a district in India, and I give you my word the native troops are splendid men.”

‘“Oh, I should not mind them at Worcester,” says Adrian. “I would sell you forage for them at Worcester—yes, and Paarl and Stellenbosch; but Almighty!” he says, “must I stay with Cronje till you have taught half a million of these stupid boys to ride? I shall be an old man.”

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‘Well, Sir, then and there they began arguing whether St. Helena would suit Adrian’s health as well as some other places they knew about, and fixing up letters of introduction to Dukes and Lords of their acquaintance, so’s Van Zyl should be well looked after. We own a fair-sized block of real estate—America does—but it made me sickish to hear this crowd fluttering round the Atlas (oh yes, they had an Atlas), and choosing stray continents for Adrian to drink his coffee in. The old man allowed he didn’t want to roost with Cronje, because one of Cronje’s kin had jumped one of his farms after Paardeberg. I forget the rights of the case, but it was interesting. They decided on a place called Umballa in India, because there was a first-class doctor there.

‘So Adrian was fixed to drink the King and Fox-hunting, and study up the Native Army in India (I’d like to see ’em myself), till the British General had taught the male white citizens of Great Britain how to ride. Don’t misunderstand me, Sir. I loved that General. After ten minutes I loved him, and I wanted to laugh at him; but at the same time, sitting there and hearing him talk about the centuries, I tell you, Sir, it scared me. It scared me cold ! He admitted everything—he acknowledged the corn before you spoke—he was more pleased to hear that his men had been used to wipe the veldt with than I was when I knocked out Tom Reed’s two lead-horses—and he sat back and blew smoke through his nose and matured his men like cigars and—he talked of the everlastin’ centuries

‘I went to bed nearer nervous prostration than I’d come in a long time. Next morning me and Captain Mankeltow fixed up what his shrapnel had left of my Zigler for transport to the railroad. She went in on her own wheels, and I stencilled her “Royal Artillery Mess, Woolwich,” on the muzzle, and he said he’d be grateful if I’d take charge of her to Cape Town, and hand her over to a man in the Ordnance there. “How are you fixed financially? You’ll need some money on the way home,” he says at last.

‘“For one thing, Cap,” I said, “I’m not a poor man, and for another I’m not going home. I am the captive of your bow and spear. I decline to resign office.”

‘“Skittles!” he says (that was a great word of his), “you’ll take parole, and go back to America and invent another Zigler, a trifle heavier in the working-parts—I would. We’ve got more prisoners than we know what to do with as it is,” he says. “You’ll only be an additional expense to me as a taxpayer. Think of Schedule D,” he says, “and take parole.”

‘“I don’t know anything about your tariffs,” I said, “but when I get to Cape Town I write home for money, and I turn in every cent my board ’ll cost your country to any ten-century-old department that’s been ordained to take it since William the Conqueror came along.”

‘“But, confound you for a thick-headed mule,” he says, “this war ain’t any more than just started! Do you mean to tell me you’re going to play prisoner till it’s over?”

‘“That’s about the size of it,” I says, “if an Englishman and an American could ever understand each other.”

‘“But, in Heaven’s Holy Name, why?” he says, sitting down of a heap on an ant-hill.

‘“Well, Cap,” I says, “I don’t pretend to follow your ways of thought, and I can’t see why you abuse your position to persecute a poor prisoner o’ war on his!”

‘“My dear fellow,” he began, throwing up his hands and blushing, “I’ll apologise.”

‘“But if you insist,” I says, “there are just one and a half things in this world I can’t do. The odd half don’t matter here; but taking parole, and going home, and being interviewed by the boys, and giving lectures on my single-handed campaign against the hereditary enemies of my beloved country happens to be the one. We’ll let it go at that, Cap.”

‘“But it’ll bore you to death,” he says. The British are a heap more afraid of what they call being bored than of dying, I’ve noticed.

‘“I’ll survive,” I says, “I ain’t British. I can think,” I says.

‘“By God,” he says, coming up to me, and extending the right hand of fellowship, “you ought to be English, Zigler!”

‘It’s no good getting mad at a compliment like that. The English all do it. They’re a crazy breed. When they don’t know you they freeze up tighter’n the St. Lawrence. When they do, they go out like an ice jam in April. Up till we prisoners left—four days—my Captain Mankeltow told me pretty much all about himself there was;—his mother and sisters, and his bad brother that was a trooper in some Colonial corps, and how his father didn’t get on with him, and—well, everything, as I’ve said. They’re undomesticated, the British, compared with us. They talk about their own family affairs as if they belonged to someone else. ’Tain’t as if they hadn’t any shame, but it sounds like it. I guess they talk out loud what we think, and we talk out loud what they think.

‘I liked my Captain Mankeltow. I liked him as well as any man I’d ever struck. He was white. He gave me his silver drinking-flask, and I gave him the formula of my Laughtite. That’s a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in his vestpocket, on the lowest count, if he has the knowledge to use it. No, I didn’t tell him the money-value. He was English. He’d send his valet to find out.

‘Well, me and Adrian and a crowd of dam Dutchmen was sent down the road to Cape Town in first-class carriages under escort. (What did I think of your enlisted men? They are largely different from ours, Sir: very largely.) As I was saying, we slid down south, with Adrian looking out of the car-window and crying. Dutchmen cry mighty easy for a breed that fights as they do; but I never understood how a Dutchman could curse till we crossed into the Orange Free State Colony, and he lifted up his hand and cursed Steyn for a solid ten minutes. Then we got into the Colony, and the rebs—ministers mostly and schoolmasters—came round the cars with fruit and sympathy and texts. Van Zyl talked to ’em in Dutch, and one man, a big red-bearded minister, at Beaufort West, I remember, he jest wilted on the platform.

‘“Keep your prayers for yourself,” says Van Zyl, throwing back a bunch of grapes. “You’ll need ’em, and you’ll need the fruit too, when the war comes down here. You done it,” he says. “You and your picayune Church that’s deader than Cronje’s dead horses! What sort of a God have you been unloading on us, you black aasvogels? The British came, and we beat ’em,” he says, “and you sat still and prayed. The British beat us, and you sat still,” he says. “You told us to hang on, and we hung on, and our farms was burned, and you sat still—you and your God. See here,” he says, “I shot my Bible full of bullets after Bloemfontein went, and you and God didn’t say anything. Take it and pray over it before we Federals help the British to knock hell out of you rebels.”

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‘Then I hauled him back into the car. I judged he’d had a fit. But life’s curious—and sudden—and mixed. I hadn’t any more use for a reb than Van Zyl, and I knew something of the lies they’d fed us up with from the Colony for a year and more. I told the minister to pull his freight out of that, and went on with my lunch, when another roan come along and shook hands with Van Zyl. He’d known him at close range in the Kimberley siege and before. Van Zyl was well seen by his neighbours, I judge. As soon as this other man opened his mouth I said, “You’re Kentucky, ain’t you?” “I am,” he says; “and what may you be?” I told him right off, for I was pleased to hear good United States in any man’s mouth; but he whipped his hands behind him and said, “I’m not knowing any man that fights for a Tammany Dutchman. But I presoom you’ve been well paid, you dam gun-runnin’ Yank.”

‘Well, Sir, I wasn’t looking for that, and it near knocked me over, while old man Van Zyl started in to explain.

‘“Don’t you waste your breath, Mister Van Zyl,” the man says. “I know this breed. The South’s full of ’em.” Then he whirls round on me and says, “Look at here, you Yank. A little thing like a King’s neither here nor there, but what you’ve done,” he says, “is to go back on the White Man in six places at once—two hemispheres and four continents—America, England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Don’t open your head,” he says. “You know right well if you’d been caught at this game in our country you’d have been jiggling in the bight of a lariat before you could reach for your naturalisation papers. Go on and prosper,” he says, “and you’ll fetch up by fighting for niggers, as the North did.” And he threw me half-a-crown—English money.

‘Sir, I do not regard the proposition in that light, but I guess I must have been somewhat shook by the explosion. They told me at Cape Town one rib was driven in on to my lungs. I am not adducing this as an excuse, but the cold God’s truth of the matter is—the money on the floor did it . . . . I give up and cried. Put my head down and cried.

‘I dream about this still sometimes. He didn’t know the circumstances, but I dream about it. And it’s Hell!

‘How do you regard the proposition—as a Brother? If you’d invented your own gun, and spent fifty-seven thousand dollars on her—and had paid your own expenses from the word “go”? An American citizen has a right to choose his own side in an unpleasantness, and Van Zyl wasn’t any Krugerite . . , and I’d risked my hide at my own expense. I got that man’s address from Van Zyl; he was a mining man at Kimberley, and I wrote him the facts. But he never answered. Guess he thought I lied …. Damned Southern rebel

‘Oh, say. Did I tell you my Captain gave me a letter to an English Lord in Cape Town, and he fixed things so’s I could lie up a piece in his house? I was pretty sick, and threw up some blood from where the rib had gouged into the lung—here. This Lord was a crank on guns, and he took charge of the Zigler. He had his knife into the British system as much as any American. He said he wanted revolution, and not reform, in your army. He said the British soldier had failed in every point except courage. He said England needed a Monroe Doctrine worse than America—a new doctrine, barring out all the Continent, and strictly devoting herself to developing her own Colonies. He said he’d abolish half the Foreign Office, and take all the old hereditary families clean out of it, because, he said, they was expressly trained to fool around with continental diplomats, and to despise the Colonies. His own family wasn’t more than six hundred years old. He was a very brainy man, and a good citizen. We talked politics and inventions together when my lung let up on me.

‘Did he know my General? Yes. He knew ’em all. Called ’em Teddie and Gussie and Willie. They was all of the very best, and all his dearest friends; but he told me confidentially they was none of ’em fit to command a column in the field. He said they were too fond of advertising. Generals don’t seem very different from actors or doctors or—yes, Sir—inventors.

‘He fixed things for me lovelily at Simonstown. Had the biggest sort of pull—even for a Lord. At first they treated me as a harmless lunatic; but after a while I got ’em to let me keep some of their books. If I was left alone in the world with the British system of book-keeping, I’d reconstruct the whole British Empire—beginning with the Army. Yes, I’m one of their most trusted accountants, and I’m paid for it. As much as a dollar a day. I keep that. I’ve earned it, and I deduct it from the cost of my board. When the war’s over I’m going to pay up the balance to the British Government. Yes, Sir, that’s how I regard the proposition.

‘Adrian? Oh, he left for Umballa four months back. He told me he was going to apply to join the National Scouts if the war didn’t end in a year. ’Tisn’t in nature for one Dutchman to shoot another, but if Adrian ever meets up with Steyn there’ll be an exception to the rule. Ye-es, when the war’s over it’ll take some of the British Army to protect Steyn from his fellow-patriots. But the war won’t be over yet awhile. He that believeth don’t hurry, as Isaiah says. The ministers and the school-teachers and the rebs ’ll have a war all to themselves long after the north is quiet.

‘I’m pleased with this country—it’s big. Not so many folk on the ground as in America. There’s a boom coming sure. I’ve talked it over with Adrian, and I guess I shall buy a farm somewhere near Bloemfontein and start in cattle-raising. It’s big and peaceful—a ten-thousand-acre farm. I could go on inventing there, too. I’ll sell my Zigler, I guess. I’ll offer the patent rights to the British Government; and if they do the “reelly-now-how-interesting “act over her, I’ll turn her over to Captain Mankeltow and his friend the Lord. They’ll pretty quick find some Gussie, or Teddie, or Algie who can get her accepted in the proper quarters. I’m beginning to know my English.

‘And now I’ll go in swimming, and read the papers after lunch. I haven’t had such a good time since Willie died.’

He pulled the blue shirt over his head as the bathers returned to their piles of clothing, and, speaking through the folds, added:

‘But if you want to realise your assets, you should lease the whole proposition to America for ninety-nine years.’

(The Kipling Society presents here Kipling’s work as he
wrote it, but wishes to alert readers that the text below
contains some derogatory and/or offensive language)

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PRIVATE COPPER’S father was a Southdown shepherd; in early youth Copper had studied under him. Five years’ army service had somewhat blunted Private Copper’s pastoral instincts, but it occurred to him as a memory of the Chalk that sheep, or in this case buck, do not move towards one across turf, or in this case, the Colesberg kopjes unless a stranger, or in this case an enemy, is in the neighbourhood. Copper, helmet back-first, advanced with caution, leaving his mates of the picket full a mile behind. The picket, concerned for its evening meal, did not protest. A year ago it would have been an officer’s command, moving as such. To-day it paid casual allegiance to a Canadian, nominally a sergeant, actually a trooper of Irregular Horse, discovered convalescent in Naauwport Hospital, and forthwith employed on odd jobs. Private Copper crawled up the side of a bluish rock-strewn hill thinly fringed with brush a-top, and remembering how he had peered at Sussex conies through the edge of furze-clumps, cautiously parted the dry stems before his face. At the foot of the long slope sat three farmers smoking. To his natural lust for tobacco was added personal wrath because spiky plants were pricking his belly, and Private Copper slid the backsight up to fifteen hundred yards . . . .‘Good evening, khaki. Please don’t move,’ said a voice on his left, and as he jerked his head round he saw entirely down the barrel of a well-kept Lee-Metford protruding from an insignificant tuft of thorn. Very few graven images have moved less than did Private Copper through the next ten seconds.

‘It’s nearer seventeen hundred than fifteen,’ said a young man in an obviously ready-made suit of grey tweed, possessing himself of Private Copper’s rifle. ‘Thank you. We’ve got a post of thirty-seven men out yonder. You’ve eleven—eh? We don’t want to kill ’em. We have no quarrel with poor uneducated khakis, and we do not want prisoners we do not keep. It is demoralising to both sides—eh?’

Private Copper did not feel called upon to lay down the conduct of guerilla warfare. This dark-skinned, dark-haired, and dark-eyed stranger was his first intimate enemy. He spoke, allowing for a clipped cadence that recalled to Copper vague memories of Umballa, in precisely the same offensive accent that the young squire of Wilmington had used fifteen years ago when he caught and kicked Alf Copper, a rabbit in each pocket, out of the ditches of Cuckmere. The enemy looked Copper up and down, folded and repocketed a copy of an English weekly which he had been reading, and said: ‘You seem an inarticulate sort of swinel—ike the rest of them—eh?’

‘You,’ said Copper, thinking, somehow, of the crushing answers he had never given to the young squire, ‘are a renegid. Why, you ain’t Dutch. You’re English, same as me.’

‘No, khaki. If you cannot talk civilly to a gentleman I will blow your head off.’

Copper cringed, and the action overbalanced him so that he rolled some six or eight feet downhill, under the lee of a rough rock. His brain was working with a swiftness and clarity strange in all his experience of Alf Copper. While he rolled he spoke, and the voice from his own jaws amazed him: ‘If you did, ’twouldn’t make you any less of a renegid.’ As a useful afterthought he added ‘I’ve sprained my ankle.’

The young man was at his side in a flash. Copper made no motion to rise, but, cross-legged under the rock, grunted: ‘’Ow much did old Krujer pay you for this? What was you wanted for at ’ome? Where did you desert from?’

‘Khaki,’ said the young man, sitting down in his turn, ‘you are a shade better than your mates. You did not make much more noise than a yoke of oxen when you tried to come up this hill, but you are an ignorant diseased beast like the rest of your people—eh? When you were at the Ragged Schools did they teach you any history, Tommy—’istory, I mean?’

‘Don’t need no schoolin’ to know a renegid,’ said Copper. He had made three yards down the hill—out of sight, unless they could see through rocks, of the enemy’s smoking party.

The young man laughed; and tossed the soldier a black sweating stick of ‘True Affection.’ (Private Copper had not smoked a pipe for three weeks.)

‘You don’t get this—eh?’ said the young man. ‘We do. We take it from the trains as we want it. You can keep the cake—you po-ah Tommee.’ Copper rammed the good stuff into his long-cold pipe and puffed luxuriously. Two years ago the sister of gunner-guard De Souza, East India Railway, had, at a dance given by the sergeants to the Allahabad Railway Volunteers, informed Copper that she could not think of waltzing with ‘a poo-ah Tommee.’ Private Copper wondered why that memory should have returned at this hour.

‘I’m going to waste a little trouble on you before I send you back to your picket quite naked—eh? Then you can say how you were overpowered by twenty of us and fired off your last round—like the men we picked up at the drift playing cards at Stryden’s farm-eh? What’s your name—eh?’

Private Copper thought for a moment of a faraway housemaid who might still, if the local postman had not gone too far, be interested in his fate. On the other hand, he was, by temperament, economical of the truth. ‘Pennycuik,’ he said, ‘John Pennycuik.’

‘Thank you. Well, Mr. John Pennycuik, I’m going to teach you a little ’istory, as you’d call it—eh?’

‘Ow !’ said Copper, stuffing his left hand in his mouth. ‘So long since I’ve smoked I’ve burned my ’and—an’ the pipe’s dropped too. No objection to my movin’ down to fetch it, is there—Sir?’

‘I’ve got you covered,’ said the young man, graciously, and Private Copper, hopping on one leg, because of his sprain, recovered the pipe yet another three yards downhill and squatted under another rock slightly larger than the first. A roundish boulder made a pleasant rest for his captor, who sat cross-legged once more, facing Copper, his rifle across his knee, his hand on the trigger-guard.

‘Well, Mr. Pennycuik, as I was going to tell you. A little after you were born in your English workhouse, your kind, honourable, brave country, England, sent an English gentleman, who could not tell a lie, to say that so long as the sun rose and the rivers ran in their courses the Transvaal would belong to England. Did you ever hear that, khaki—eh?’

‘Oh no, Sir,’ said Copper. This sentence about the sun and the rivers happened to be a very aged jest of McBride, the professional humorist of D Company, when they discussed the probable length of the war. Copper had thrown beef-tins at McBride in the grey dawn of many wet and dry camps for intoning it.

‘Of course you would not. Now, mann, I tell you, listen.’ He spat aside and cleared his throat. ‘Because of that little promise, my father he moved into the Transvaal and bought a farm—a little place of twenty or thirty thousand acres, don’t—you—know.’

The tone, in spite of the sing-song cadence fighting with the laboured parody of the English drawl, was unbearably like the young Wilmington squire’s, and Copper found himself saying: ‘I ought to. I’ve ’elped burn some.’

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‘Yes, you’ll pay for that later. And he opened a store.’

‘Ho! Shopkeeper was he?’

‘The kind you call “Sir” and sweep the floor for, Pennycuik . . . . You see, in those days one used to believe in the British Government. My father did. Then the Transvaal wiped thee earth with the English. They beat them six times running. You know thatt—eh?’

‘Isn’t what we’ve come ’ere for.’

‘But my father (he knows better now) kept on believing in the English. I suppose it was the pretty talk about rivers and suns that cheated him—eh? Anyhow, he believed in his own country. Inn his own country. So—you see—he was a little startled when he found himself handed over to the Transvaal as a prisoner of war. That’s what it came to, Tommy—a prisoner of war. You know what that is—eh? England was too honourable and too gentlemanly to take trouble. There were no terms made for my father.’

‘So ’e made ’em ’imself. Useful old bird.’ Private Copper sliced up another pipeful and looked out across the wrinkled sea of kopjes, through which came the roar of the rushing Orange River, so unlike quiet Cuckmere.

The young man’s face darkened. ‘I think I shall sjambok you myself when I’ve quite done with you. No, my father (he was a fool) made no terms for eight years—ninety-six months—and for every day of them the Transvaal made his life hell for my father and—his people.’

‘I’m glad to hear that,’ said the impenitent Copper.

‘Are you? You can think of it when I’m taking the skin off your back—eh? . . . My father, he lost everything—everything down to his self-respect. You don’t know what thatt means—eh?’

‘Why?’ said Copper. ‘I’m smokin’ baccy stole by a renegid. Why wouldn’t I know?’

If it came to a flogging on that hillside there might be a chance of reprisals. Of course, he might be marched to the Boer camp in the next valley and there operated upon; but Army life teaches no man to cross bridges unnecessarily.

‘Yes, after eight years, my father, cheated by your bitch of a country, he found out who was the upper dog in South Africa.’

‘That’s me,’ said Copper valiantly. ‘If it takes another ’alf-century, it’s me an’ the likes of me.’

‘You? Heaven help you! You’ll be screaming at a wagon-wheel in an hour . . . . Then it struck my father that he’d like to shoot the people who’d betrayed him. You—you—you! He told his son all about it. He told him never to trust the English. He told him to do them all the harm he could. Mann, I tell you, I don’t want much telling. I was born in the Transvaal—I’m a burgher. If my father didn’t love the English, by the Lord, mann, I tell you, I hate them from the bottom of my soul.’

The voice quavered and ran high. Once more, for no conceivable reason, Private Copper found his inward eye turned upon Umballa cantonments of a dry dusty afternoon, when the saddle-coloured son of a local hotel-keeper came to the barracks to complain of a theft of fowls. He saw the dark face, the plover’s-egg-tinted eyeballs, and the thin excited hands. Above all, he remembered the passionate, queerly-strung words. Slowly he returned to South Africa, using the very sentence his sergeant had used to the poultry man.

‘Go on with your complaint. I’m listenin’.’

‘Complaint! Complaint about you, you ox! We strip and kick your sort by thousands.’

The young man rocked to and fro above the rifle, whose muzzle thus deflected itself from the pit of Private Copper’s stomach. His face was dusky with rage.

‘Yess, I’m a Transvaal burgher. It took us about twenty years to find out how rotten you were. We know and you know it now. Your Army—it is the laughing-stock of the Continent.’ He tapped the newspaper in his pocket. ‘You think you’re going to win, you poor fools! Your people—your own people—your silly rotten fools of people will crawl out of it as they did after Majuba. They are beginning now. Look what your own working classes, the diseased, lying, drinking white stuff that you come out of, are saying.’ He thrust the English weekly, doubled at the leading article, on Copper’s knee. ‘See what dirty dogs your masters are. They do not even back you in your dirty work. We cleared the country down to Ladysmith—to Estcourt. We cleared the country down to Colesberg.’

‘Yes. We ’ad to clean up be’ind you. Messy, I call it.’

‘You’ve had to stop farm-burning because your people daren’t do it. They were afraid. You daren’t kill a spy. You daren’t shoot a spy when you catch him in your own uniform. You daren’t touch our loyall people in Cape Town! Your masters won’t let you. You will feed our women and children till we are quite ready to take them back. You can’t put your cowardly noses out of the towns you say you’ve occupied. You daren’t move a convoy twenty miles. You think you’ve done something? You’ve done nothing, and you’ve taken a quarter of a million of men to do it! There isn’t a nigger in South Africa that doesn’t obey us if we lift our finger. You pay the stuff four pounds a month and they lie to you. We flog ’em, as I shall flog you.’

He clasped his hands together and leaned forward his out-thrust chin within two feet of Copper’s left or pipe hand.

‘Yuss,’ said Copper, ‘it’s a fair knock-out.’ The fist landed to a hair on the chin-point, the neck snicked like a gun-lock, and the back of the head crashed on the boulder behind.

Copper grabbed up both rifles, unshipped the cross-bandoliers, drew forth the English weekly, and picking up the lax hands, looked long and intently at the finger-nails.

‘No! Not a sign of it there,’ he said. ‘’Is nails are as clean as mine—but he talks just like ’em though. And he’s a landlord too! A landed proprietor! Shockin’, I call it.’

The arms began to flap with returning consciousness. Private Copper rose up and whispered ‘If you open your head, I’ll bash it.’ There was no suggestion of sprain in the flung-back left boot. ‘Now walk m front of me, both arms perpendicularly elevated. I’m only a third-class shot, so, if you don’t object, I’ll rest the muzzle of my rifle lightly but firmly on your collar-button—coverin’ the serviceable vertebree. If your friends see us thus engaged, you pray—’ard.’

Private and prisoner staggered downhill. No shots broke the peace of the afternoon, but once the young man checked and was sick.

page 3

‘There’s a lot of things I could say to you,’ Copper observed, at the close of the paroxysm, ‘but it doesn’t matter. Look ’ere, you call me “pore Tommy”again.’

The prisoner hesitated.

‘Oh, I ain’t goin’ to do anythin’ to you. I’m reconnoiterin’ on my own. Say “pore Tommy” ’alf-a-dozen times.’

The prisoner obeyed.

‘That’s what’s been puzzlin’ me since I ’ad the pleasure o’ meetin’ you,’ said Copper. ‘You ain’t ’alf-caste, but you talk chee-chee—pukka bazar chee-chee. Proceed.’

‘Hullo,’ said the Sergeant of the picket, twenty minutes later, ‘where did you round him up?’

‘On the top o’ yonder craggy mounting. There’s a mob of ’em sitting round their Bibles seventeen ’undred yards (you said it was seventeen ’undred ?) t’other side—an’ I want some coffee.’ He sat down on the smoke-blackened stones by the fire.

‘’Ow did you get ’im ?’ said McBride, professional humorist, quietly filching the English weekly from under Copper’s armpit.

‘On the chin—while ’e was waggin’ it at me.’

‘What is ’e? ’Nother Colonial rebel to be ’orribly disenfranchised, or a Cape Minister, or only a loyal farmer with dynamite in both boots? Tell us all about it, Burjer!’

‘You leave my prisoner alone,’ said Private Copper. ‘’E’s ’ad losses an’ trouble; an’ it’s in the family too. ’E thought I never read the papers, so ’e kindly lent me his very own Jerrold’s Weekly—an’ ’e explained it to me as patronisin’ as a—as a militia subaltern doin’ Railway Staff Officer. ’E’s a left-over from Majuba—one of the worst kind, an’ ’earin’ the evidence as I did, I don’t exactly blame ’im. It was this way.’

To the picket Private Copper held forth for ten minutes on the life-history of his captive. Allowing for some purple patches, it was an absolutely fair rendering.

‘But what I dis-liked was this baccy-priggin’ beggar, ’oo’s people, on ’is own showin’, couldn’t ’ave been more than thirty or forty years in the coun—on this Gawd-forsaken dust-’eap, comin’ the squire over me. They’re all parsons—we know that, but parson an’ squire is a bit too thick for Alf Copper. Why, I caught ’im in the shameful act of tryin’ to start a aristocracy on a gun an’ a wagon an’ a shambuk! Yes; that’s what it was: a bloomin’ aristocracy.’

‘No, it weren’t,’ said McBride, at length, on the dirt, above the purloined weekly. ‘You’re the aristocrat, Alf. Old Jerrold’s givin’ it you lot. You’re the uneducated ’ireling of a calcallous aristocracy which ’as sold itself to the ’Ebrew financeer. Meantime, Ducky’—he ran his finger down a column of assorted paragraphs—‘you’re slakin’ your brutal instincks in furious excesses. Shriekin’ women an’ desolated ’omesteads is what you enjoy, Alf . . . . Halloa! What’s a smokin’ ’ektacomb?’

‘’Ere! Let’s look. ’Aven’t seen a proper spicy paper for a year. Good old Jerrold’s!’ Pinewood and Moppet, reservists, flung themselves on McBride’s shoulders, pinning him to the ground.

‘Lie over your own bloomin’ side of the bed, an’ we can all look,’ he protested.

‘They’re only po-ah Tommies,’ said Copper, apologetically, to the prisoner. ‘Po-ah unedicated khakis. They don’t know what they’re fightin’ for. They’re lookin’ for what the diseased, lying, drinkin’ white stuff that they come from is sayin’ about ’em!’

The prisoner set down his tin of coffee and stared helplessly round the circle.

‘I—I don’t understand them.’

The Canadian sergeant, picking his teeth with a thorn, nodded sympathetically.

‘If it comes to that, we don’t in my country! . . . Say, boys, when you’re through with your English mail you might ’s well provide an escort for your prisoner. He’s waitin’.’

‘Arf a mo’ Sergeant,’ said McBride, still reading. ‘’Ere’s Old Barbarity on the ramp again with some of ’is lady friends, ’oo don’t like concentration camps. Wish they’d visit ours. Pinewood’s a married man. He’d know how to be’ave!’

‘Well, I ain’t goin’ to amuse my prisoner alone. ’E’s gettin’ ’omesick,’ cried Copper. ‘One of you thieves read out what’s vexin’ Old Barbarity an’ ’is ’arem these days. You’d better listen, Burjer, because, afterwards, I’m goin’ to fall out an’ perpetrate those nameless barbarities all over you to keep up the reputation of the British Army.’

From that English weekly, to bar out which a large and perspiring staff of Press censors toiled seven days of the week at Cape Town, did Pinewood of the Reserve read unctuously excerpts of the speeches of the accredited leaders of His Majesty’s Opposition. The night-picket arrived in the middle of it, but stayed entranced without paying any compliments, till Pinewood had entirely finished the leading article, and several occasional notes.

‘Gentlemen of the jury,’ said Alf Copper, hitching up what war had left to him of trousers—‘you’ve ’eard what ’e’s been fed up with. Do you blame the beggar? ’Cause I don’t! . . . Leave ’im alone, McBride. He’s my first and only cap-ture, an’ I’m goin’ to walk ’ome with ’im, ain’t I, Ducky? . . . Fall in, Burjer. It’s Bermuda, or Umballa, or Ceylon for you—and I’d give a month’s pay to be in your little shoes.’

As not infrequently happens, the actual moving off the ground broke the prisoner’s nerve. He stared at the tinted hills round him, gasped and began to struggle—kicking, swearing, weeping, and fluttering all together.

‘Pore beggar—oh, pore, pore beggar!’ said Alf, leaning in on one side of him, while Pinewood blocked him on the other.

‘Let me go! Let me go! Mann, I tell you, let me go——’

‘’E screams like a woman!’ said McBride. ‘They’ll ’ear ’im five miles off.’

‘There’s one or two ought to ’ear ’im—in England,’ said Copper, putting aside a wildly waving arm.

‘Married, ain’t ’e?’ said Pinewood. ‘I’ve seen ’em go like this before just at the last. ‘Old on, old man. No one’s goin’ to ’urt you.’

page 4

The last of the sun threw the enormous shadow of a kopje over the little, anxious, wriggling group.

‘Quit that,’ said the Sergeant of a sudden. ‘You’re only making him worse. Hands up, prisoner! Now you get a holt of yourself, or this’ll go off.’

And indeed the revolver-barrel square at the man’s panting chest seemed to act like a tonic; he choked, recovered himself, and fell in between Copper and Pinewood.

As the picket neared the camp it broke into song that was heard among the officers’ tents:

’E sent us ’is blessin’ from London town
(The beggar that kep’ the cordite down),
But what do we care if ’e smile or frown,
The beggar that kep’ the cordite down?
The mildly nefarious
Wildly barbarious
Beggar that kep’ the cordite down!

Said a captain a mile away: ‘Why are they singing that? We haven’t had a mail for a month, have we?’

An hour later the same captain said to his servant: ‘Jenkins, I understand the picket have got a—got a newspaper off a prisoner to-day. I wish you could lay hands on it, Jenkins. Copy of the Times, I think.’

‘Yes, Sir. Copy of the Times, Sir,’ said Jenkins, without a quiver, and went forth to make his own arrangements.

‘Copy of the Times?’ said the blameless Alf, from beneath his blanket. ‘I ain’t a member of the Soldiers’ Institoot. Go an’ look in the reg’mental Readin’-room—Veldt Row, Kopje Street, second turnin’ to the left between ’ere an’ Naauwport.’

Jenkins summarised briefly in a tense whisper the thing that Alf Copper need not be.

‘But my particular copy of the Times is specially pro’ibited by the censor from corruptin’ the morals of the Army. Get a written order from K. o’ K., properly countersigned, an’ I’ll think about it.’

‘I’ve got all you want,’ said Jenkins. ‘’Urry up. I want to ’ave a squint myself.’

Something gurgled in the darkness, and Private Copper fell back smacking his lips.

‘Gawd bless my prisoner, and make me a good boy. Amen. ’Ere you are, Jenkins. It’s dirt cheap at a tot.’

page 1 of 5

From Stormberg’s midnight mountain,
From Sanna’s captured Post,
Where Afric’s Magersfontein
Rails down her wounded host.
Three days and nights to s’uth’ard
‘Twixt Durban Road and Paarl—
In dust and horse-dung smothered—
There lies a cursed kraal.
[‘Stellenbosch Hymn’]

ABOUT the time that Gentleman Cadet Walter Setton was posted to the 2nd Battalion of Her Majesty’s Royal Rutlandshire Regiment, the Vicar, his father, read a telegram that the Pretoria Government was searching the mines of the Rand for hidden arms. The Vicar and his wife were on their way to the Army and Navy Stores to buy Walter’s many uniforms; and the Vicar doubted that he would escape for less than two hundred pounds.

‘But we cannot repine,’ said his wife. ‘Walter’s position demands —’ She ceased for a breath. And as an officer — you see, William? We have much to be thankful for.’

The Vicar lowered the paper, remembering how the accident of a legacy had saved Walter from other fates. He and his wife had agreed to forget a terrible afternoon when Walter, aged sixteen, had been examined viva voce by a person, sent down by a friend, with a view togetting him a ‘position in the City’ at something under eighteen shillings a week. He had forgotten, too, how he and his wife were grateful for this chance. A week later, when the Vicar’s aunt was gathered to her mothers and the money was sure, they wrote a stately letter declining that post for Walter, which letter remains for a curiosity in a business man’s desk to this day.

‘Yes,’ said the Vicar, ‘we have much to be thankful for. As an officer —’ He turned down the paper.

Had he read ten lines further he would have learned that ‘much amusement has been caused in mining circles owing to the activity of the police, who are searching Thumper’s Deep, on information supplied by Mr. J. Thrupp, who asserts that two thousand stand of arms are buried at the bottom of the shaft.’

At the hour the Vicar was speculating in ‘tunics, richly laced, lined silk £6 14s. 6d.’; ‘undress trousers, blue doe or twill, £1 16s. 0d.’; ‘forage caps (badge extra), £1 Os. 6d.’, and all the other grim realities of war, Jerry Thrupp, in charge of the thirty-odd thousand pounds of modern machinery on Thumper’s Deep, was cheering a batch of perspiring Johannesburg police to break out the bottom of South Africa. Business was slack in Johannesburg by reason of a Raid, and Jerry’s ten years on the Rand taught him that the police were least dangerous when most busy. Two thousand rifles in a concrete vault, ten feet below the solid foot of the shaft, would be a great haul for the Government. That they worked in the living rock was to them a detail. The Devil had given these Uitlanders powers denied to sons of the soil; and no community in their senses would start a revolution on less than twenty thousand rifles. A scant fifteen hundred only had, so far, come to light anywhere.

‘Where you think we shall find them?’ a panting Hollander asked.

‘About the Marquesas Islands if you hold your line straight’, said Jerry, and shot up in the cage. Three minutes later he telephoned that the winding-gear was out of order and would take half a day to repair.

‘They had a very nice time,’ he explained to his professional friends. ‘They dug four feet into the bottom of the shaft before they sickened, and Patsy Gee burned a hundredweight of his precious Revolutionary Committee’s papers in my boiler fires while they were doing it. But as a revolution, if you ask me, it’s bumble-puppy. After this we shall have war.’

‘Not a bit of it,’ said Hagan of the Consolidated Ophir and Bonanza. ‘We shall be passed over to Oom Paul to play with.’

‘Never mind,’ said Jerry. ‘It’s war. Soon or late, it’s war.’

Time, Circumstance, and Necessity continued in charge of this world, of Jerry Thrupp, and Second-Lieutenant Walter Setton. To the former they brought from eight to twelve hours’ work a day—shifting, varying, but insistent. Sometimes a batch of the three hundred and twenty-four stamps in the Thumper’s Deep crushing-mills would go wrong; and Jerry must doctor them ere the output suffered. Sometimes a sick friend in charge of the cyanide process would call Jerry in to watch the health of the big vats that win the last of the gold; or a furlong or two of tram-lines would need re-laying. His winding-engines, his boilers, his crushing-tables, his dynamos, and the hundred things that men needed below the surface were always with him. For recreation Jerry consorted with fellow-engineers of the Rand, their wives, and their children; and, being energetic, found opportunities for what he called ‘overtime’. When Hagan’s ankle was crushed, thanks to a kaffir’s carelessness, Jerry carried him home; and, because Hagan’s ten-year-old son was in hospital with typhoid, Jerry, as a matter of course, visited and reported on the boy daily. He lent the Vincents the money that took them home in the terrible year ’98, when Johannesburg lost heart and business shut down, and Vincent was turned out into Commissioner Street with Mrs. Vincent seven months gone. It is even said that by bribes and threats he kept the conservancy people up to their work in his street when the typhoid that comes from neglected filth struck down three heads of families in two hundred yards of the Street.

‘After the war,’ Jerry would say as excusing himself, ‘it will be all right. We’ve got to do what we can till after the war.’

The life of Second-Lieutenant Walter Setton followed its appointed channel. His battalion, nominally efficient, was actually a training school for recruits; and to this lie, written, acted, and spoken many times a day, he adjusted himself. When he could by any means escape from the limited amount of toil expected by the Government, he did so; employing the same shameless excuses that he had used at school or Sandhurst. He knew his drills: he honestly believed that they covered the whole art of war. He knew the ‘internal economy of his regiment’. That is to say, he could answer leading questions about coal and wood allowances, cubic-footage of barrack accommodation, canteen-routine, and the men’s messing arrangements. For the rest, he devoted himself with no thought of wrong to getting as much as possible out of the richest and easiest life the world has yet made; and to despising the ‘outsider’ — the man beyond his circle. His training to this end was as complete as that of his brethren. He did it blindly, politely, unconsciously, with perfect sincerity. As a child he had learned early to despise his nurse, for she was a servant and a woman; his sisters he had looked down upon, and his governess, for much the same reasons. His home atmosphere had taught him to despise the terrible thing called ‘Dissent’. At his private school his seniors showed him how to despise the junior master who was poor, and here his home training served again. At his public school he despised the new boy — the boy who boated when Setton played cricket, or who wore a coloured tie when the order of the day was for black. They were all avatars of the outsider. If you got mixed up with an outsider, you ended by being ‘compromised’. He had no clear idea what that meant, but suspected the worst. His religion he took from his parents, and it had some very sound dogmas about outsiders behaving decently. Science to him was a name connected with examination papers. He could not work up any interest in foreign armies, because, after all, a foreigner was a foreigner, and the rankest form of outsider. Meals came

page 2

when you rang for them. You were carried over the world, which is the Home Counties, in vehicles for which you paid. You were moved about London by the same means, and if you crossed the Channel you took a steamer. But how, or why, or when, these things were made, or worked, or begotten, or what they felt, or thought, or said, who belonged to them, he had not, nor ever wished to have, the shadow of an idea. It was sufficient for him and for high Heaven (this in his heart of hearts, well learned at his mother’s knee) that he was an officer and a gentleman incapable of a lie or a mean action. For the rest his code was simple. Money brought you half the things in this world; and your position secured you the others. If you had money, you took care to get your money’s worth. If you had a position, you did not compromise yourself by mixing with out siders.

And, in the fullness of time, one old gentleman who knew his own mind knocked the bottom out of Lieutenant Setton’s and Jerry Thrupp’s world. Jerry came first, unwillingly, with a few thousand others, by way of Komati Poort. He helped the women and children out of Johannesburg, the few that remained; and left his house barricaded in charge of a Hollander official.

‘Remember,’ said Jerry, ‘I advise you to look after this house. If anything happens to it you won’t be happy when I come back.’

‘We shall chase you into the sea!’ said the Hollander.

‘Shouldn’t wonder—seeing how behind-hand we are, but then we’ll chase you back again. I hope you won’t blow yourselves up before you’re shot. S’long, you four-coloured impostor.’

He climbed into a cattle-truck, where his valise was stolen, and arrived at Delagoa Bay, his shirt torn to the waist in a scuffle to get water for a sick man. His home, his business, and all his belongings were gone, but the war that men had doubted was upon them at last, and Jerry was happy. He went round to Cape Town on the deck of a crowded steamer, and disappeared into panic-stricken Adderley Street. Here he met Phil Tenbroek, ex-mine-manager, also ruined for the time being, and conferred with him about raising a corps of Railway Volunteers in event of future trouble.

Lieutenant Setton, seven thousand miles away, was scornful when he heard that some General would not undertake the war with less than seventy thousand troops. Thirty thousand, he held, was more than enough; for the Rutlandshires’ Mess would remember that the Army was not what it had been in ’81. He wished very much to see how the Boers would look after a Cavalry Brigade had boxed their ears across ten miles of open country. Except twice, near Salisbury, he had never seen anything that remotely resembled ten miles of open country in all his life. He had never seen a Cavalry Brigade, nor, indeed, a target at any greater distance than 900 yards. Having spoken, he went up to Town to see a play, pending the absorption of the Transvaal.

The Rutlandshires landed at Cape Town fairly late in the war, and, serene as hundreds before him, Lieutenant Setton, dining at the Mount Nelson, gave, in the fine clear voice he had inherited from his mother, his opinion that ‘those Colonials looked a most awful set of outsiders’. He hoped, aloud, that it would not be his fate ‘to have to work with the bounders’.

In another place, at another time, an informal after-dinner court of inquiry, with unlimited powers, sat on his irreproachable Regiment after this fashion: —

‘Are those Rutlandshires any use?’ The questioner had good right to ask.

‘Mark Two, I think. It’s the same old brand— Badajos, Talavera, Inkerman, Toulouse, Tel-el-Kebir—.’

‘Same tactics as those which were so brilliantly successful at Tel-el- Kebir,’ a bearded officer whispered as though he were quoting Scripture.

‘Ye-es. Same old catchwords — same old training. ‘Shoulder to shoulder’ — ‘up, boys, and at ’em!’ ‘Southsea, Chichester, Canterbury; with the Long Valley for a campaign. Colonel past his work; second- in-command devoutly hoping never to see a soldier again when he’s got his pension; a jewel of an Adjutant, who’s smothered his men till they can’t button their own breeches; Sergeant-Major great on eyewash, and a bit of a lawyer. The rest, the regular type — all in a blue funk of funking. They want a chance to ‘get in with the bayonet’, of course.’

‘That’s the last refuge of the lazy man,’ said a quiet-faced civilian, who had not yet spoken.

‘Oh, they’ll learn in time,’ the spade-bearded officer grunted. ‘When half the men are in Pretoria and half the rest are wounded — if that’s what you mean! I’m so sick of that ‘in time”. The Colonel will die — I wish he was dead now — ‘fighting heroically’ in some dam’- fool trap he’s walked into with his eyes open!’

‘Well, I’m going to split ’em up. They were promised they should go in — ah — shoulder to shoulder, but the hospitals are quite full enough.’

To their immense rage the Rutlandshires were rent into four or five pieces, and distributed where they could not do much harm. The Colonel, as was prophesied, died heroically, shot through the stomach in sight of four companies to whom he was explaining the cowardice of advancing in open order when the enemy were yet a mile distant. This fixed in the Second’s mind the fact that a Mauser can carry two thousand yards — wisdom which he did not live long to profit by. He went down at eleven hundred before an insignificant crack in the veldt, which happened to be lined with Boers. Thus his successor discovered that a donga is better flanked than fronted. Truly they learned.

To Lieutenant Setton, through the death of a Captain, fell the charge of two companies, which operated with an Australian contingent on a disturbed and dusty border. The men clung to him for a week expecting miracles; but he could not smite water from rocks, nor vary the daily beef-tin and dry biscuit. They learned a little rude well-sinking from their allies, and a little stealing on their own account. After this, to his relief, they abandoned him as nurse and midwife. Had he played the game with an eye to the rules, he might have profited as much as his more open-minded fellows, but his demon tempted him one clear twilight to capture a solitary horseman in difficulties with a spent horse. It was not ‘sporting’ to pot him at eight hundred yards, so Setton took horse and rode a somewhat uncertain gallop directly at the man, who naturally retreated between two steep hills, where, for just this end, he had posted four confederates. They, being children of nature and buck-hunters to boot, allowed their quarry to pass, and after twenty rounds at four hundred yards — the Boer in a hurry is not a good shot — dropped him with a broken arm. Setton was not pleased; but the five Australians who, without orders, so soon as they saw what he would be at, had galloped parallel with him behind the kopjes, were immensely gratified. They dismounted, lay down, and slew the Boer on the tired horse as he returned to join his fellow-plunderers, of whom they shot two and wounded one. They reached camp with Setton and — much more valuable — three efficient Boer ponies.

‘If you’d only told us you were goin’ to commit suicide this way,’ said a Queensland trooper, ‘we’d have rounded up the whole mob — usin’ you for bait.’

page 3

The shattered arm ended Setton’s career as a combatant officer, but in the great scarcity of sounder material they made him Station Commandant of the entirely desolate siding of Pipkameelepompfontein, which, as everyone knows:

Is on the road to Bloemfontein:
And there the Mausers
Tear your trousers
And make your horses jompfontein.
[ORG Volume 8, 8/5387 UC verse No.755B]

But the tide of war had rolled on, leaving only a mass of worrying work for the Railway Pioneer Corps which Phil Tenbroek had organised from the wreck of the mine personnel months before. Three short low bridges, little larger than culverts, but two of them built on a curve, crossed three dry shallow water-courses, and, of course, the Boers blew them up on departure. Phil, Commandant of the Railway Pioneers, busy on a bridge elsewhere, could only spare thirty men on the job, but he gave Lieutenant Hagan, late in charge of the machinery of the Consolidated Ophir and Bonanza, his choice, and Hagan took the cream. They lumbered into Pipkameelepompfontein in open trucks — thirty men — each anxious to return to the Rand; each holding more or less of property there; most of them skilled mechanicians in their own department, and all exalted, body, soul, and spirit, by a rancorous, razor-edged, personal hatred of the State that had shamed, tricked, and ruined them. They found there a Station Commandant, moved by none of their springs – a being from another planet, fenced about with neatly piled boxes of rivets and a mass of crated ironwork that was pouring up from the South, who proposed to camp them a mile from the broken bridges.

‘What, no good water?’ said Hagan.

‘Oh, no. But I expect a detachment of Regulars shortly. They must have the nearest camp.’

‘Good Lord, man! Your blessed Regulars can’t get forward till we’ve mended the bridges. We must be close to our work.’

‘I’m afraid your knowledge of the British Army is a little limited,’ said the Station Commandant.

‘I was fool enough to cross a ridge after some Regulars had reported it cleared,’ said Hagan sweetly.’ ‘Twasn’t any fault of theirs my knowledge didn’t last till the Day of Judgment. But, look here, this isn’t a question of precedence. We don’t want to live here. We want to mend the bridges and get up to the Rand again.’

After a while, but ungraciously, Setton gave way, and the Railway Pioneers went to work like beavers. The Regulars arrived ‘to protect the bridge-head’, two companies of them, fresh from home, and Setton, with unspeakable delight, found himself once more among men who talked his chosen tongue, and thought his lofty thoughts. As he wrote to his mother: ‘You can get as good hunting-talk here as you can at home.’ The Pioneers were not a seemly corps. They unstacked the accurately piled rivet-boxes, and dumped them where they could be easily handled; they dismantled an abandoned farmhouse to get at the roof-beams, because they were short of poles; they stuck a home-made furnace at the far end of the platform where it made itself a black, unlovely bed of cinders; they worked at all hours of the day and night, ate when they had leisure, and called their officers by their lesser names. Hagan asked Setton — once only — what arrangements he had made for Kaffir labour. Setton had made none, for he had no instructions. Whereupon Hagan, talking unknown tongues, made his own arrangements, and strange niggers crept out of the Marroo by scores. Setton wished to know something about them. ‘It’s all right,’ said Hagan, over his shoulder. ‘I’m responsible. It’s cheaper for us’ (he meant the Consolidated Ophir and Bonanza) ‘to pay out of our pocket than to wait for the Government to fiddle through it. I want to get back to the Rand.’

The last sentence always annoyed Setton. These voluble Johannesburg gipsies made it their dawn-song, their noon chorus, and their midnight chant. It swung girders into place, sent home rivets, and spiked nails. It echoed among the hills at twilight, when the startlingly visible night-picket of the Regulars went out to relieve its fellows, cut in black paper against the green sky-line, on the tallest kopje. It greeted every truck of new material, this drawling, nasal ‘I want to get back to the Rand.’

It helped to build the bridges, though that Setton did not notice. He did not know a spike from a chair a girder from an artesian well, a thirty-foot rail from a tie-rod. The things lumbered up the siding which he wished to keep neat. Men took them out of the trucks and did things to or with them, and the things, somehow or other, spanned the watercourses. But Lieutenant Setton would no more have dreamed of taking an interest in the manner of their fitment than at school he would have read five lines beyond the day’s appointed construe.

When the last of the three bridges was nearly finished, Hagan dashed into his office with a wire from Phil, who wanted him back at once. The big centre girder of Folly Bridge was going up, and only Hagan could take charge of that end of it which was not under Phil’s comprehending eye.

‘But the men here know exactly what’s to be done. If anything goes wrong, ask Jerry — I mean Private Thrupp. He ought to begin riveting up to-morrow, and after that they’ve only to lay the track. It’s as easy as falling off a log.’

Setton did not approve of this unbuttoned man with the rampant voice — had, indeed, withdrawn markedly from his society. Nor did Setton comprehend how a private could be in charge of anything — least of all when a Regular officer — not to mention a Station Commandant — was on the horizon. He assumed that Hagan would have told the senior non-com, of the Pioneers to come to him for orders for the day; but Hagan, eating, sleeping, and thinking bridges only, had not communicated with Sergeant Rayne — late accountant of Thumper’s Deep, and promoted because Government had insisted that the Corps must keep books. Hagan had spent his last hours at an informal committee meeting with Jerry and another private — Fulsom, ex-head of the Little North Bear’s machinery — and, under the lee of a karroo-bush, drawing diagrams in the dirt, had settled every last detail of the bridge that was to help the Corps back to their own Rand.

Brightly and briskly, then, in the diamond-clear dawn, up rose Lieutenant Walter Setton to command the station of Pipkameelepompfontein. But early as it was, the Pioneers were before him. The situation when he arrived at the bank of the third watercourse was briefly this. They were lowering, with hand-made derricks, two fourteen-foot girders, one from either bank, to meet in the middle, where Jerry and Fulsom stood ready to join them. The twenty-eight-foot girder, which should have covered the span had been sent round by Naauwport by mistake, and Jerry believed devoutly that the Cape Minister of Railways, whom he habitually alluded to as ‘the worst rebel but one of the lot’, had caused the delay on purpose. The mischief of it was that, expecting the twenty-eight foot iron, they had used the last of their wood sleepers to lay a sharp curve just before the bridge, where iron sleepers were difficult to bend and adjust. Consequently, they had no temporary cribs of sleepers in the middle of the watercourse to take the weight of the two fourteen-foot irons when these were lowered. So Jerry had extemporised a stage of rivet-boxes and lath sufficient to bear his weight and Fulsom’s, and knowing his men, trusted to rivet up the buttstrap, temporarily, at any rate, while the men on the derricks held the girders, lowering them or raising them fractionally at his signal. It was unorthodox engineering, but it would carry the line. By four in the morning the heels of the girders were neatly butted against their permanent resting-places, and their noses began to dip towards the meeting in the centre.

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‘North girder!’ Jerry raised his hand and lowered it slowly.

The obedient gang at the derrick slacked away with immense care. They were not watching Private Thrupp, but Jerry of Thumper’s Deep, and Fulsom of the Little North Bear—both mighty men.

‘Ready with the rivets, now! Here she comes! Hold her! Hold her! As you are! Not another hairsbreadth. South girder—lift a shade. A fraction of a hair!’ He laid a spirit level across the half-inch gap between the two girders, and cocked his head on one side. Nobody breathed except Lieutenant Setton, who had walked some distance in a hurry. He observed that a bucket of blazing coals — stolen, of course — was slung under the belly of either ‘iron thing’. He always thought of concrete objects beyond his experience as ‘things’. Four men passed up two flat iron things — the specially designed butt-straps — one to Jerry and one to Fulsom, who faced Jerry on the other side of the girder. So close was the adjustment that the weight of the straps as they were slid between the flanges of the girder made the south girder — held by ropes, not chains — dip a fraction, and Jerry swore as only a Rand mechanician on twelve hundred a year and a bonus has a right to swear — emphatically and authoritatively.

‘What are you doing there, men?’ The voice passed Jerry like the summer wind. One hand was on the spirit-level, the other held a riveting hammer; one eye squinted at the bubble in the glass, the other, red with emotion, glared through the holes in the butt-strap, waiting till the expansion of the heated girders should bring the rivet-holes in line. Astronomers watching for an eclipse gaze not so earnestly as did Jerry and Fulsom.

‘I say, what are you men doing there without orders?’ cried Lieu- tenant Setton for the second time.

‘Hah!’ said Jerry, wagging the hammer to command silence. He was half aware now of some disturbing presence. The rivet-holes covered each other absolutely.

‘Rivets to me! Quick, McGinnies. Meet me, Fulsom.’ A man passed up the pincers with the red-hot rivet, and Jerry hammered like an artist. ‘That’ll make old —’ (he mentioned the Cape Minister of Railways by name) ‘pretty sick! Thought he’d hang us up by sending our stuff round by Naauwport, did he? Hold on! Rivet, rivet, McGinnies! What’s the use of you? Derricks, there! Hold on! What are you men doing? Oh, good Lord!’

If Jerry on the rivet-boxes was losing his temper, Lieutenant Setton by the south girder had lost his altogether.

‘You thought!’ he shouted to the amazed gang at the derrick. ‘you thought! Who in the world told you to think? D’you supposeyou’re here to do what you please? I gave no orders for the work to go on. Your orders, if you’d thought to come to my office to get them, are to clean up some of the filthy mess you’ve made round the Station.’

Then to Sergeant Rayner ‘Fall in your men at once, and march them up to the station. You’ll get your orders there.’

‘But half a mo’, sir. Half a minute, sir. We can’t let go —.’

‘Do you refuse duty, then? I warn you it’ll be the worse for you. You can’t do this — you can’t do that? Let go that rope-thing at once. It’s mutiny, by God! ‘

They let go at the south end. They fell back, not knowing the limits of Imperial power. The unsupported girder bit heavily on the single rivet that Jerry and Fulsom had put in — bit and shore through. The north gang let go an instant later. A howl of rage came out of the ravine as both girders dropped into a dolorous, open-sided V, knocked over the light staging, and twisting as they fell, scattered the fire in the coal-bucket among the dry scrub and fragments of timbering in the bed of the watercourse. They lit at once and blazed merrily. A man with a hammer erupted.

‘Who slacked away without orders?’ he demanded in a voice no private should use. One or two men had heard it before — at the time of the big dynamite explosion in Johannesburg — and straightened up.

‘Fall in your company there, and don’t talk,’ said Lieutenant Setton. He was willing to concede much to a mere Volunteer — even in time of war.

‘It was him, Jerry,’ whispered Sergeant Rayne.

Jerry turned a full mulberry-colour as he strove to control himself — he was quivering all over. Then he grew pale and rigid.

‘Ha-half a minute, please. I want to explain to you exactly how the work stands. The girders were just in position and I was riveting them up — my name is Thrupp.’

It carried some weight on the Rand, but Lieutenant Setton almost laughed aloud.

‘If you wouldn’t mind listening to me, please. It was an absolutely vital matter — absolutely vital. We were actually riveting the butt-strap when you meddled with the derrick. Let me show you! ‘ — he laid one shaking hand on the Lieutenant’s cuff — to lead him to the wreck.

‘Meddle with the derrick! What the devil do you mean by your insolence? Do you know who I am?’

‘In half an hour—in five minutes — we could have put in enough rivets to hold her. We shall have to go to work again. It means half a day’s delay, though, even if the girders aren’t twisted by the fall. . . . You can see it hung on only one rivet.’

‘Fall in with your company — for the last time.’

‘But you don’t understand — you don’t understand. Let me explain a minute, and come here ‘ —again the hand on the cuff. ‘Of course, you don’t realise what you’ve done. It was only a question of minutes — minutes — do you see? —before we should have had those two girders — those short irons down there — riveted up. Good Lord! That scrub’s burning like tinder! We must shovel earth on it, or it will twist the girders out of shape; and’ — the voice rose almost to a shriek — ‘we shall have to send down the line for duplicates. I — you – tell the men to chuck earth on that blaze, for God’s sake. The girders will buckle! They’ll be ruined.’

‘March this man to the guard-tent,’ said Lieutenant Setton, who had endured enough. It was the insolence and insubordination of the man that galled him. ‘Another time, perhaps, you’ll take the trouble to obey orders.’

‘What for? What have I done? My dear chap, this isn’t the time to fiddle about with guard-tents. The whole donga’s alight, and we shall have those girders buckling in ten minutes. You can’t be going to leave the mess as it is — you can ‘t! ‘

‘Oh, I’ve stood enough of this. Silence. Understand you’re a prisoner.’

‘Me? Oh, yes, I’m anything you please if you’ll only let me put out that fire. Where the deuce d’you think I’d want to run to? I’ll come up to the guard-tent the minute it’s out. I give you my word of honour! ‘

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By this time the Railway Pioneer Corps was in two minds — some laughing and others looking very black. Only Sergeant Rayne, busy with a pocket-book, seemed to take no interest in the affair.

‘March me off? With that fire burning? We’ll be delayed a week at least. Why — why — why — ‘ again Jerry turned plum-colour. Fulsom and McGinnies, who knew his habits, closed in on him at once.

‘Come on, Jerry,’ whispered Fulsom. ‘You’ve done all you can. Come on.’

‘All that I can? What do I matter? I’m thinking about the bridge.’ He walked in a sort of stupor, looking back from time to time to watch the smoke in the donga. The Railway Pioneer Corps followed slowly to sweep up the platform of Pipkameelepompfontein.

‘Rayne has got down every word you said in shorthand,’ said Fulsom, when the prisoner reached the guard-tent. ‘And he’s going to wire Hagan now. For God’s sake, don’t open your mouth, Jerry, and we’ll get that young ass Stellenbosched in a day or two.’

‘Hung up for a week—hung up for a week! ‘ moaned Jerry. ‘Am I mad or is he? Tell Rayne to wire for spare girders. God knows where they are to come from! Perhaps Phil may have a couple at Folly Bridge. Better wire there as well. Those two will have buckled by now.’

‘He was extremely insolent, if that’s what you mean. He deliberately questioned my authority before all the men several times. He kept pawing me all over, too. I don’t suppose he really meant half he said.’

‘Didn’t he?’ Hagan gulped, but curbed himself.

‘The trouble with you Volunteers,’ said Setton, rising on one arm, ‘is that you’ve absolutely no notion of military discipline; and on active service one can’t allow that sort of thing. However, I think forty-eight hours in the guard-tent will teach him a little sense. I’ve no intention of carrying the matter any further, so we needn’t discuss it.’

Hagan stared at him with a horror that carried something of admiration, and a little — not much — pity. He had come up with Colonel Palling, R.E., and had shown him the third bridge.

‘Is this his tent?’ one cried without, and there entered a Colonel of Her Majesty’s Royal Engineers, not in a common regimental rage, but such cold fury as an overworked man responsible for a few miles of track in war-time may justly wear. He chewed his three-months’ beard, and looked at Lieutenant Setton, who stood to attention.

‘You will go,’ he whispered at last. ‘You will go back to the base by the train this morning. You will give this note to the General there.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Do you know why you go?’

‘No, sir.’

The Colonel’s neck-veins swelled. ‘I — I wish to speak to this officer,’ he said.

It is the first maxim of internal economy that one should never reprimand a superior in the presence of his equal or his subordinate. Hagan withdrew. A sentry a few yards away stood fast. He was a Reservist of some experience.

‘Gawd ‘as been ‘eavenly good to me,’ he said later to fifteen comrades. ‘I’ve heard quite a few things in my time. I’ve ‘eard the Dook ‘imself pass the time o’ day with an ‘Orse battery that turned up on the wrong flank in the Long Valley. I ‘eard ‘Smutty’ Chambers lyin’ be’ind an ant-‘ill at Modder getting sunstroke. I ‘eard wot General Mike said when the cavalry was too late at Stinkersdrift. But all that was ‘Let me kiss ‘im for ‘is mother’ to wot I ‘eard this mornin’. There wasn’t any common damn-your-eyes routine to it. Palling, ‘e just felt about with ‘is fingers till ‘e’d found that little beggar’s immortal soul — ‘e did. An’ then ‘e pulled it fair out of ‘im like a bloomin’ pull-through an’ then ‘e blew ‘is nose on it like a bloomin’ ‘andkerchief, an’ then ‘e threw it ‘way. Swore at ‘im? No. You chaps don’t take me. It was chronic. That’s what it was — just chronic’.

In the peaceful and loyal district of Stellenbosch — there was a subaltern, temporarily attached as supernumerary on the Accounts side of the Numdah and Bootlace Issue Department, who knew exactly how the Army ought to be reorganised. And he said: ‘It’s all very well to talk about makin’ the Army a business, like those newspaper chaps do, but they don’t understand the spirit of the Service. How can they? Well, don’t you see, if they bring in all those so-called reforms that they’re always talkin’ about, they simply fill up the Service with a lot of bounders and outsiders. They simply won’t get the class of men to join that the Army really wants. No one will take up the Service as a profession then. I know I shan’t for one’