WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
^f^v 
 
 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 BY 
 
 J. P. KAY ROBINSON 
 
 WITH INTRODUCTORY LETTER BY 
 GENERAL BOTHA 
 
 NEW YORK 
 E. P. DUTTON k COMPANY 
 
 681 FIFTH AVENUE 
 1916 
 

 {All rights reserved) 
 
EDWARD KAY ROBINSON 
 
 THIS COLLECTION OF SKETCHES 
 
 IS FONDLY INSCRIBED 
 
 BY HIS SON 
 
 THE AUTHOR 
 
 518 iG 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 General Botha's Letter 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. The Occupation of Luderitzbucht 
 
 II. The Real Thing . 
 
 III. Sandstorms and Ceremonies 
 
 IV. Sights and Smells 
 
 V. Alarums and Excursions 
 
 VI. A Night Ride, and After 
 
 VII. Big Game, but Small Bags 
 
 VIII. War's Grim Jests and Morals 
 
 PAGE 
 9 
 
 II 
 
 27 
 
 44 
 6o 
 88 
 
 112 
 
 133 
 146 
 
V 
 
Prime Minister's Office, 
 Cape Town, 
 24M November ^ 1915- 
 
 Dear Mr. Robinson — 
 
 I have not had time to read through 
 the proofs of your book " With Botha's 
 Army," but a hurried perusal thereof has 
 given me much pleasure. It contains an 
 able and good description of the fine spirit 
 which animated our army in German South - 
 West Africa, and of the good humour which 
 kept our men cheerful under most trying 
 conditions . 
 
 I have pleasure in recommending your 
 book to the public, 
 
 Yours faithfully 
 
WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE OCCUPATION OF LUDERITZBUCHT 
 
 The story of the campaign of German South - 
 West Africa is written, plain for all time, 
 across the sands of that amazing country, 
 and an empty bully-beef tin, half -buried in 
 the flank of a tawny sand-dune, is eloquent 
 of most of its detail. 
 
 But this, of course, we did not know when, 
 on the I ith of September;, 1914, we packed 
 our horses on the s.s. Monarch, and our- 
 selves aboard the Gaika to await the dice- 
 throw of Chance. It is true that we were 
 more or less certain as to our destination, 
 but it is equally true that our knowledge 
 on this point was strictly unofficial, and 
 therefore sinful. 
 
 Not that we greatly cared, however. Our 
 optimism was a thing colossal. We were 
 
12 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 going to finish the German South-West cam- 
 paign in three months ; we would spend 
 Christmas in Cape Town, and by the New 
 Year we would be on our way to a state 
 entry into Berlin. It is small wonder, then, 
 if we felt almost casually patriotic as we 
 ploughed past Robben Island in the wake of 
 H.M.S. Astrcea, our escort. 
 
 The Portuguese explorers, who first dis- 
 covered the place which held our destiny, 
 called it Angra Pequena ; the Germans, who 
 came later, re -christened it Luderitzbucht ; 
 and we, who were a portion of a brigade 
 or a fraction of a division — we never knew 
 which ! — learned subsequently to know it by 
 a number of other names, most of them 
 inspired, and all of them utterly unprintable. 
 
 Incidentally^ we were a squadron of the 
 Imperial Light Horse^ which had been 
 weaned — too early, some thought — from its 
 mother -regiment, and which now, some five 
 days adrift ujx)n a venture of the waters, 
 sucked at the fingers of Rumour, and stared 
 uneasily at a dim coastline upheaved above 
 the rim of troubled waters. Uneasily, 
 because the " rolling veld " {vide the 
 English Press), whence we had come, had 
 in nowise prepared us for the rolling ocean. 
 
LUDERITZBUCHT 13 
 
 and the waters had not dealt kindly with us. 
 In truth we were a very sick ship, and I am 
 inclined to believe that some amongst us 
 looked upon that sudden appearance of land, 
 less as the attainment of our objective — for 
 it was German South-West Africa — than as 
 a violent and sympathetic upheaval on the 
 part of the ocean itself. 
 
 At any time a terrible thing, sea-sickness 
 becomes invested with a horrid grandeur 
 when you may see, as I have seen, whole 
 squadrons and battalions laying their all 
 before their Maker. A great leveller, 
 though. Pride of new-got stars and pomp 
 of crowns and stripes bow before it, and 
 a mere private with sea-legs is worth a dozen 
 brigadiers without. With us, however, there 
 were very few distinctions. The Armoury 
 Guard, posted in the evil -smelling hold, 
 were sick as they presented arms, and the 
 visiting orderly officer succumbed as un- 
 affectedly as he returned their salute. 
 
 Thus, for five and a half days, we voyaged 
 — save the mark ! We spent the better part 
 of two days balancing ourselves to the 
 thrust of cross -seas, while tugs bellowed 
 around us, and the Astrcea, or so we under- 
 stood it, disappeared in search of a German 
 
14 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 South -West Africa of which our navigators 
 had lost all reckoning — and at the end of 
 that grisly time the tall spike of a light- 
 house stood out upon a black fang of rock 
 and a white snarl of broken water, and we 
 were told that it was Luderitzbucht . 
 
 There was magic in that intimation. Men 
 who had not been sufficiently interested in 
 things even to accept a chance -sent whisky - 
 and -soda — these were the very worst cases — 
 suddenly busied themselves in cleaning 
 neglected rifles, and even, when they thought 
 that no one was looking, in surreptitious 
 feelings of the points of their bayonets. 
 
 Ah ! Little did we know then of what 
 was to follow. But the bayonets did come 
 in useful for opening tins of milk, any- 
 way I 
 
 After the lighthouse came what appeared 
 to be a land-locked arm of the sea. That 
 slid astern of us, and was followed by a 
 more or less well-defined bay that ended 
 abruptly in a conglomeration of tin and 
 plaster, and red and green roofs. Luderitz- 
 bucht beyond any shadow of doubt ! What 
 exactly we expected I do not know. It 
 seemed feasible that the place might be 
 fortified and we braced ourselves. 
 
LUDERITZBUCHT 15 
 
 Nothing seemed to happen, however. The 
 Astrcea dropped anchor at a quarter of a 
 mile or so nearer the town, and that was 
 all. The Reuter man, who used to write 
 what we afterwards learned to call the 
 ** Luderitzbucht Society Notes," would 
 doubtless have said that she trained her 
 guns on the town. Perhaps she did. To 
 us she merely looked supremely bored. 
 
 From one or two of the houses white flags 
 that looked like table-cloths were hysteri- 
 cally waving. It was distinctly flattering, 
 and I know that we felt immensely forbear- 
 ing. Then some one saw the German flag 
 that flaunted its garish challenge to us from 
 the lighthouse, and we began to feel then 
 as a German must, I think, when he ceases 
 to be a German and becomes a Hun. 
 
 •We landed at four o'clock in the afternoon. 
 It was a very quiet affair. The few inhabi- 
 tants who were to be seen about tried to 
 look as if they hadn't noticed us, although 
 we rather more than filled Luderitzbucht, 
 and the Transvaal Scottish are a little ob- 
 trusive at times. There were a lot of ladies, 
 however — ladies who did not look like ordi- 
 nary inhabitants, and who stood on the 
 verandas of the houses and smiled kindly 
 
i6 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 at us. We blushed by battalions and 
 passed on. 
 
 We, the I.L.H., were assigned to quarters 
 in what was called the " Diamenten Gesell- 
 schaft." When we got there it was dark, 
 and we made ourselves as comfortable as 
 we could — those of us that were not on guard 
 — in a sort of donkey kraal. There were 
 some fowls there, I remember, and we 
 performed some quite creditable atrocities 
 with our bayonets. Then — I never quite 
 knew how started the whisper that grew and 
 was flung from man to man and from troop 
 to troop until the whole squadron knew it — 
 " Beer! " 
 
 Beer. Yes ! Dozens upon dozens of cases 
 of it. Long, beautifully long bottles of pale, 
 cool -looking Pilsener. The least said about 
 it the better. Indeed, recollection is apt to 
 be a little hazy upon the point. But this 
 I know, that until the Headquarter Staff dis- 
 covered that in tackling German South-West 
 they had tackled an uncommonly thirsty 
 proposition, and sent down wagons and took 
 it away from us, every man of us looked at 
 war, if not through rose-coloured spectacles 
 exactly, at least through gold -tinted glasses. 
 
 Months later that same beer was retailed 
 
LUDERITZBUCHT 17 
 
 back to us by Supreme Authority at nine- 
 pence the bottle ! Why ninepence ? we often 
 wondered. 
 
 The first really distinct phase of the cam- 
 paign was camels. They — there were three 
 of them — wandered in one day out of the 
 desert and were captured by the Rand Light 
 Infantry. Captured ! Yes ! I think that 
 is the word. The R.L.I., however, seemed 
 vastly more impressed than were the camels. 
 
 There is no authentic record of how, 
 eventually, the camels came to us, but we 
 believe it was something after this manner : 
 
 Scene : Company of R.L.I, seen vaguely 
 through sandstorm. More vaguely still, 
 three camels looming out of nowhere in 
 particular. 
 
 Company Colour - Sergeant to Company 
 Officer : '* Beggin' y'r pardon, sir ! But 
 about them three 'ummin' birds " 
 
 Company Officer : Good God^ man ! How 
 the devil should I know? Do I look as if 
 I ? Oh, damn it ! send 'em up to Head- 
 quarters." 
 
 Follows period filled in by mor*e sandstorm, 
 grunts of camels, and hearty British cheers, 
 as news flies around that R.L.I, have routed 
 entire German Camel Corps. Then — 
 
 2 
 
i8 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 Brigade-Major to Brigadier : " Ahem I 
 Sir ! Three camels have just turned up " 
 
 Brigadier {absently) : Ah ! Just ask them 
 to step in, will you?" 
 
 B.'M. : ** Camels, I said, sir ! " 
 
 B, : "What? The devil f' 
 
 B.-M.: " No, sir ! Camels, sir I " 
 
 B. : " Camels ! Good God ! Where 
 from?" 
 
 B.-M, : " They didn't say, sir ! What are 
 we to do with them, sir?" 
 
 B, : " Do with them? Um ! Well— er, 
 let me see. Um I Er ! Oh ! Confound 
 it 1 give em to the I.L.H. ! " 
 
 So we got them. And, until some eight 
 months later, when the squadron left Luder- 
 itzbucht for Walvis, we kept them. 
 
 There was nothing very lovable about 
 them. They bit us and they sneered at us, 
 they frightened our horses and they smelt 
 abominably. But they aroused the envy and 
 the admiring interest of all the other regi- 
 ments, and the nurses used to come up from 
 the hospital to take photographs of them, and 
 so — we kept them. 
 
 I omitted to mention the fact that the 
 camels brought a native with them. 
 
 Nominally, no doubt, he was in charge of 
 
LUDERITZBUCHT 19 
 
 them, but I do not think that he ever let 
 the camels know it. He came to us as well, 
 and he told us their names and a lot of 
 other interesting facts. He said, for instance, 
 that if you ejaculated " Hut ! " and kicked 
 them at the same time, they might go — 
 " might," in this instance, was right I — and 
 that if you said *' 'riwa ! " with the same 
 accompaniments they would get up. 
 
 They did, with a disconcerting suddenness 
 that generally caught you as you were half 
 way into the saddle. A word that sounded 
 something like " Twitts," he further in- 
 formed us, was the signal for them to 
 sit down. 
 
 One of our corporals who was looked up 
 to as an authority upon camels, because in 
 his infancy he had ridden one at the Zoo, 
 was placed in charge of them, and on the 
 morning following their advent he and the 
 writer and one of our lieutenants took them 
 out — save the mark ! they took us for a 
 saunter round the town. We had a good 
 deal of fun that morning, but I think the 
 camels had more. Two of our party, I know, 
 enjoyed themselves hugely when ** Lands- 
 man " — he was the second biggest camel — 
 tried to rub the corporal off his back against 
 
20 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 some particularly atrocious German archi- 
 tecture. 
 
 To our great joy — the camels were be- 
 having themselves for the moment — we met 
 the whole of the Brigade Staff out for an 
 airing, and, as might be expected of three 
 camels in a very narrow street, attracted their 
 attention. 
 
 For what happened to him after that our 
 lieutenant himself was solely responsible. 
 He was explaining to the most gorgeous - 
 looking Staff officer exactly how one dealt 
 with camels. " You see," he said, " when 
 you want them to sit down you simply say 
 ' Tootsie.' " (This was quite safe: they 
 were already sitting down.) "And when 
 you want them to get up you just lift your 
 leg — like this — and you say ' Riw ' " 
 
 He had scarcely got the quotation mark 
 out of his mouth when the vast bulk of 
 the camel beneath him rose with the awful 
 suddenness of an exploding mine and smote 
 him violently aloft. How he managed to 
 retain some sort of a hold I do not pretend 
 to know. In civilian life he is a dentist, 
 and perhaps that partly explains it. 
 
 Anyway, the rest of that morning's ride 
 is lost in the memory of that lieutenamt- 
 
LUDERITZBUCHT 21 
 
 man hanging head downwards — his arms 
 clasped around the cameFs forelegs, and 
 saying, in all sorts of voices of agonized 
 
 protest and cajolery : ** Tootsie ! Oh, d 
 
 you ! Tootsie ! " 
 
 It is not altogether easy to understand 
 why war should be so much more impres- 
 sive to the spectator at a distance than to 
 the man engaged in it. Perhaps it is that 
 the sense of personal detachment shows 
 things in a clearer perspective, or perhaps, 
 again, it is simply that the terseness of 
 official cablegrams leaves so much to the 
 imagination. Myself, I incline to the latter ; 
 but this I know : that the bulletins — we in 
 German South -West were never exalted to 
 the rank of the communique — which told 
 the world of " the occupation of Luderitz- 
 bucht " conveyed a vastly more dramatic 
 aspect of that feat than ever entered the 
 philosophy of those who were merely respon- 
 sible for it. 
 
 For us, indeed, those first few days in 
 Luderitzbucht held more of humour than 
 anything else. Our horses did not come 
 ashore until September 21st — three days 
 after our own landing — and, deprived thus 
 of our sole justification, we loafed around 
 
22 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 the town or indulged in foraging expeditions 
 as the fancy took us. With the infantry, 
 of course, it was far otherwise, and we were 
 constantly being reminded of the war by 
 the sight of them scuffling away at their 
 trenches and blockhouses. 
 
 One of the features of Luderitzbucht was 
 the number of its gramophones. Every 
 house had one. I use the word ** had " ad- 
 visedly, because there followed a period — 
 happily brief — when nearly every one of us 
 included a gramophone in his personal lug- 
 gage. We did not — indeed, we did not — 
 loot them. We only borrowed them. 
 Which, it may be said, is a difference with 
 at least an air of distinction ! 
 
 A squadron of gramophones, all playing 
 at the same time, and all, of course, play- 
 ing different airs — from eternal Wagner to 
 the German equivalent for Harry Lauder — 
 is a fearsome thing, and it is not, perhaps, 
 to be wondered at that they quickly palled. 
 The first note of their decline in popularity 
 was struck, I think, when one night a voice 
 was heard entreating any one — he did not 
 care who — to swap him "a tin of milk for 
 a gramophone, records and all ! " 
 
 It was at about this time, too, that a brain 
 
LUDERITZBUCHT 23 
 
 wave on the part of some Staff officer 
 took the tangible form of what were known 
 by the courtesy title of " surprise alarms," 
 and the manner of them was thus : A 
 message would be sent from Brigade Head- 
 quarters to officers commanding units to the 
 effect that an alarm would be sounded that 
 night. " The hour for the alarm/' the 
 message would add, " is left to the discretion 
 of officers commanding." The utmost 
 secrecy, too, was to be observed, as it was 
 essential that the men should be taken com- 
 pletely by surprise. 
 
 The officer commanding unit would then, 
 in the strictest confidence, of course, tell 
 each one of his troop officers, and they, 
 again in the strictest confidence, would in- 
 form their troop sergeants ; from the troop 
 sergeants it would filter through to the 
 corporals, and the corporals would hand it 
 on to the troops themselves. There, at least, 
 the confidence was justified. The secret 
 could go no farther. 
 
 Thus, when a " surp^rise alarm " did occur, 
 its chief feature, in so far as we were con- 
 cerned, lay in the well -simulated astonish- 
 ment of our O.C. at the extraordinary 
 rapidity with which his men had turned 
 
24 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 out. Upon one occasion, however, he did 
 most unfeignedly break down. An alarm 
 had sounded. We were in our places, and 
 '* the old man " was about to address us in 
 a few well -chosen words, when, to the sur- 
 prise of nearly everybody, the throaty 
 strains of " Deutschland Ueber Alles *' fell 
 upon our astounded ears. The culprit, it 
 was discovered, was a man in No. i troop, 
 and his subsequent explanation to the 
 effect that the gramophone was a cheap 
 German patent that went off like an alarm 
 clock was, I am glad to say, received with 
 some considerable coldness. 
 
 Nearly every one must be familiar with 
 the fable of '^sop that tells of the untimely 
 death of a herd-boy who played at alarms, 
 of how his comrades wearied in time of the 
 game, and of how one day, when cause for 
 real alarm came, they took no notice of his 
 cries for help, and he perished, and every- 
 body turned round to everybody else and 
 said, " I told you so ! " 
 
 History, with us, very, very nearly re- 
 peated itself. Not, of course, that we 
 should necessarily have perished. On the 
 contrary, we should, in all probability, have 
 gained an imperishable fame. 
 
LUDERITZBUCHT 25 
 
 There had been a succession of these sur- 
 prises, and when one night we were 
 aroused without having been warned before- 
 hand we were mightily disgruntled thereat, 
 and by way of expressing our disgust^ 
 turned out as we had slept — the plutocrats 
 and the more successful looters in pyjamas^ 
 and the others in absurdly inadequate shirts. 
 Over these we had, of course, slipped our 
 greatcoats and bandoliers, so that, in the 
 darkness, we looked quite presentably war- 
 like. Then, to our collective horror, we 
 learned that this was no surprise alarm, 
 that something had happened^ or was going 
 to happen, and for some quarter of an hour 
 we stood in our blushing deshabille, and 
 prayed fervently that there would be no order 
 to saddle up. There was no order, and we 
 went back to our blankets, chastened and 
 deeply thankful. 
 
 No power of imagination can conjure up 
 any approach to the mental picture of the 
 squadron of us flaunting our indecency over 
 the mocking sand-dunes for a day or more 
 — as we might so easily have had to do. 
 Even the enemy's camel corps would have 
 blushed the blush of outraged " kultur " I 
 
 Our horses were landed on the afternoon 
 
26 -WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 of the 2 1 St. Poor beasts I Draggle-tailed, 
 cut, and kicked about, they looked like 
 ghosts of the animals that we had shipped 
 at Cape Town only ten days before. If 
 we had suffered to some extent on that 
 ,memorable trip, what had they, packed 
 like sardines in the noisome hold of a 
 dilapidated sea -tramp 1 By the evening, 
 however, hard grooming and ointment had 
 worked wonders, and when, on the follow- 
 ing morning, we led them down to the sea for 
 exercise, they bore but little resemblance to 
 the spectres of the day before. On the next 
 day again they had picked up so wonderfully 
 that we saddled up and exercised them. 
 Gentle work at first ; but on the 24th, when, 
 for the first time, we mounted in ** marching 
 order," they looked fit for any amount of 
 hard work. They got it — sooner than was 
 expected ! 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE REAL THING 
 
 Qn the afternoon of the 25 th the order came 
 that we were to fall in at eight o'clock that 
 night in heavy marching order, and with 
 one day's rations each for horse and man. 
 What did it mean ? Was it the real thing at 
 last? Questions elicited nothing. Our 
 officers merely replied that they did not 
 know — there was an order from Head- 
 quarters, and that was all. 
 
 So we waited, and an hour before the time 
 saw us ready to the last little detail of filled 
 water-bottles and rolled greatcoats. Eight 
 o'clock came, and we fell in with our led 
 horses and waited again. 
 
 ** Sixty extra rounds of ammunition to each 
 man I " The order came from somewhere 
 out of the darkness, and one could feel the 
 stir of relieved tension as its import went 
 home to the waiting ranks. This was no 
 
 foolery of surprise alarm I We were going 
 
 27 
 
28 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 somewhere to do something, and the con- 
 fused murmur broke into open jubilation. 
 " Stop that talking ! " A silence, then the 
 same even -toned voice went on : " There is 
 to be no talking — whatsoever ! There is to 
 be no smoking ; any man caught striking 
 a match will be dealt with — promptly!" 
 Silence again, broken by the uneasy creaking 
 of leather and the restlessness of horses. 
 Some one was counting in a low voice : 
 '* Three, four " — I could just catch the words 
 — '* five, six. That's your lot ! " and there 
 followed the whispered acknowledgment of 
 the man on my left as he slipped the packets 
 of extra rounds into his wallets. My turn 
 next, and then the turn of the man on my 
 right, and so on, down the line. 
 
 " Charge your magazines with five rounds 
 apiece." It was our troop officer who was 
 speaking. A pause, then: "Ready? . . . 
 Prepare to mount. Mount I " Followed a 
 confused jumble as the lines of troops broke 
 and surged and swayed and surged back 
 again. Horses do not like night work, and 
 are sometimes emphatic in expressing them- 
 selves. 
 
 Some one was in difficulties just in front 
 of me. There was a sound of furious buck- 
 
THE REAL THING 29 
 
 ing, followed by a smothered oath and a 
 thud as the rider landed squarely on his 
 back. Some one else — I do not know who 
 he was beyond the fact that he stood on 
 the ground and was shaking me by the hand 
 — said: "Good-bye, old man. Good luck ! '* 
 and — ** By sections from the right. . . . 
 Walk march ! " and he had dodged out of 
 the way of the wheeling sections and was 
 gone. 
 
 With No. I Troop in the advance — they 
 were to pay, and dearly, for that pride of 
 place before we returned ! — we filed off, 
 troop by troop and section by section, into 
 the waiting darkness. 
 
 It may in all truth be a small thing, this 
 starting on a night patrol, but it must be 
 remembered that to most of us it was the 
 first taste of anything of the nature. None 
 of us had any conception of where we were 
 going, or why. The country was utterly 
 unknown to us — we hoped vaguely that some 
 one with us knew something. It was dark. 
 There were presumably some German gentle- 
 men waiting somewhere to receive us. We 
 were half choked by a fine white dust that 
 hung about our path, and it was — oh ! the 
 greatest fun. 
 
30 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 Past the jail we rode, past the cemetery 
 with its white mist of headstones, past the 
 R.L.I, pickets, who turned out in amazement 
 at the dust -curtained quarter of a mile of 
 horses and men ; past the flanks of great 
 granite hills, and so into the open, where 
 the ghostly, half-light — it is never really 
 dark in the sand -belts of G.S.W. — rioted 
 with the imagination and made of sand- 
 dunes mountains, and of mountains clouds 
 that changed while you watched them into 
 belts of trees where no trees could be, or 
 disappeared altogether if you turned from 
 them for a moment, and all the time the 
 sound of our progress went up like the sound 
 of a sea. Always it was with us, that 
 muffled beat of hoofs, that was like the quiet 
 lisp of summer seas as we ploughed through 
 the sand, and the thunder of heavy surf as 
 the squadron took the bare granite. 
 
 Hour after hour we rode. No one knew 
 the time, or greatly cared. A blanket of 
 sea-mist came after, and wrapped us in its 
 wet folds, whilst, ahead, a dull red glow 
 in the heart of the darkness set us guessing 
 at our objective. We had seen that same 
 glow from Luderitzbucht on the previous 
 evening, and had been told that the Germans 
 
THE REAL THING 31 
 
 were burning railway construction works at 
 Kolmanskuppe . " A night attack ! " The 
 thought tingled, and we rdde on, keenly 
 expectant, and as keenly conscious, now, that 
 we were making a good deal of noise, and 
 of what that might mean to us. 
 
 With the hours died that half-formed 
 hope. We were too wet and sleepy and cold 
 to care much what happened, and when, 
 somewhere towards the dawn, the order came 
 to dismount and ring our horses, we obeyed 
 almost automatically. (" Ringing " horses 
 consists in tying them, head to head, in a 
 circle. In the ring thus formed the guard 
 has every horse's head within easy reach 
 of his hand, and one man may thus easily^ 
 manage twenty or even thirty horses.) 
 
 This was done as well as our numbed 
 fingers permitted, and we lay down to the 
 most cheerless vigil I ever remember. The 
 sea -mist had gone, and its place was filled 
 by a wind that sobbed over the dunes ,and 
 scourged us with whiplash sand, and we lay 
 and burrowed under each other for warmth, 
 and swore for the sake of the further warmth 
 that we might get out of the swearing. 
 
 " Saddle iup ! " Never was order so 
 welcome, and we sat up to stare through 
 
32 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 sand -rimmed eyes at a dawii, steel -grey and 
 pitilessly cold, but dawn for all that, and by 
 the time that we had worked the stiffness and 
 numbness out of ourselves sufficiently to be 
 able to tighten the girths of our horses 
 (one does not " off -saddle " when the enemy 
 are presumed to be within a few hundred 
 yards of one's bivouac), red day, like a 
 bloodshot eye, was staring over a horizon 
 of lilac -tinted sand-dunes, and we mounted 
 and rode away into a riot of colour that grew 
 more madly drunken with the light. 
 
 It is perhaps in some subconscious feeling 
 that one is within reasonable distance of 
 suddenly and violently attaining the ultimate 
 end of things that there lies this fuller and 
 keener appreciation of beauty than one 
 knows at other times. Whatever the reason, 
 however, it is there. I have felt it, and — I 
 have watched others . 
 
 Sunrise found us in a world of amazing 
 sand-dunes, and the silence and wonder of 
 the place gripped us and held us. We 
 watched great chunks of yellow and red sun- 
 light flung from dune to^ dune, caught and 
 held an instant on some bluff crest ; then it 
 was gone, and the sand that it had touched 
 put on morning robes of violet and mauve, 
 
THE REAL THING 33 
 
 and dunes farther on caught up the sun's 
 vagrant glory and held it aloft and mocked 
 aloud, and became grey and dead in their 
 turn. Sheer witchcraft ! Permission to 
 smoke was given, and the magic of the place 
 took the blue film that rose from the 
 squadron and twisted that into beauty. 
 Farther distances uplifted themselves to 
 colour -drunken senses ; fields of alabaster, 
 rose -suffused and laced with faintest blue 
 vein -work. Hills beyond, quivering with 
 
 unnameable colour and Hullo ! What 
 
 was this ? 
 
 The squadron had halted and we could see 
 men of the leading troops dismounting and 
 creeping up the flank of a sand-dune. How 
 slowly they moved. Bang! 
 
 The shot seemed to come from nowhere 
 in particular, and nothing much seemed to 
 happen, save perhaps that my horse jumped 
 even more violently than did its rider. Who 
 had fired ? And why ? I looked round at 
 the man on my right for an answer, and 
 found that he was looking at me. 
 
 Bang! This time it was undoubtedly one 
 of our own men firing, for I distinctly saw 
 the "kick-up" of his rifle. But at what? 
 Bang! Bang! Bang! They were at it 
 
 3 
 
34 WITH BOTHA S ARMY 
 
 merrily, enough now. Two troops, at least, 
 down to it on the top of the sand-hill. A 
 man, some twenty yards to my left front, 
 shouted something about getting under cover, 
 and the top of a baby sand-dune, about mid- 
 way between us, was smitten into fine dust 
 by a something that whined as it went on, 
 and we " got " — hurriedly ! 
 
 Another ricochet cried overhead as we 
 reached the cover of the sand-hill. One 
 troop only was standing to its horses. The 
 others were clustered thickly along the 
 ridge. It was our troop that was " standing 
 to," but no one seemed to be taking any 
 particular notice of us, so we surreptiously 
 handed over our horses and crawled up into 
 the firing line . 
 
 Some four hundred yards away was a 
 conglomeration of tin sheds and a small 
 brick-built house. ** What's up?" I asked 
 of a man who was recharging his magazine. 
 " Don't know," he replied laconically. " Pm 
 chipping brickwork ! Hullo ! One of our 
 chaps has got it ! " A man in No. i Troop 
 had slid a few feet down the slope and 
 was holding his wrist. The blood was just 
 beginning to trickle through between his 
 fingers. A cigarette, I noticed, was still in 
 
THE REAL THING 35 
 
 his mouth. " Only a scratch ! " observed the 
 laconic one. " But I wonder where they're 
 firing from. They're not in the house, I 
 swear ! " 
 
 *' There they go ! " The shout was raised 
 by some one at the far end of the line, and 
 away down the valley, beyond the buildings, 
 there appeared four figures on horseback, 
 galloping all they knew. " Nine hundred 
 yards ! " snapped the man next to me as 
 he readjusted his sights. Every one was 
 firing now, and the sand was kicking up 
 in little spurts all round the flying figures. 
 
 At fifteen hundred yards we gave it up, 
 and a bend in the valley took the four from 
 our sight. 
 
 Suddenly there appeared in the wake of 
 the Germans a crowd of running figures, 
 and the firing, which had died down, broke 
 out anew. " Don't shoot ! " some one 
 shouted. " They're niggers ! " and we held 
 and waited. They were niggers, as we found 
 when, half an hour later. No. 4 Troop had 
 rounded them up — and pretty badly scared 
 niggers at that. They seemed, however, 
 after the manner of the African native, to 
 be in nowise astonished at our not shooting 
 them out of hand ; though we learned sub- 
 
36 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 sequently that they had most emphatically 
 expected to be destroyed — the Germans had 
 told them so. 
 
 It was easy, when we reached the 
 buildings, to learn how the Germans had 
 eluded us with such perfect ease. Behind 
 the tin sheds — one of them bore in large 
 black letters the information that this was 
 "Fort Grasplatz " — the ground sloped 
 steeply to the valley below, and the sand 
 showed us where their horses had been 
 held for them until they had considered it 
 was time to go. 
 
 It was all rather humiliating. If we 
 had done this, or had not done that — 
 we grew rather heated over the discussion 
 — we should have got them. Very an- 
 noying ! but we found some considerable 
 measure of consolation in a breakfast of 
 looted coffee, fancy biscuits, and Limburger 
 cheese. There were some excellent cigars, 
 too, in one of the sheds, and when, even- 
 tually we mounted and rode away along the 
 line (Grasplatz, in times of peace, was a 
 railway-station), We felt quite large-minded 
 on the subject. 
 
 Our officers, too, must have felt the 
 humanizing influence, for we learned from 
 
THE REAL THING i^j 
 
 them, in snatches here and there, some of 
 " the reasons why " of our expedition, and 
 out of these snatches we pieced together a 
 fairly consecutive whole. Our main objec- 
 tive, that of bagging the Germans at Gras- 
 platz, had failed — we learned that. What 
 actually we had accomplished was a big 
 loop around Kolmanskuppe, and we were 
 now returning to that place to meet the 
 R.L.I., who had left Luderitzbucht some 
 hours after us on the previous evening. 
 We might see some fun on the way back, 
 but it was very unlikely. That was all. 
 
 The railway line which we were following 
 lies along the back of an immense outcrop 
 of granite. To our left, at some miles 
 distance, was the sea ; to our right, the 
 desert . 
 
 It was worth watching, that desert. 
 Ghostly mirage stalked there, and little 
 yellow sandstorms got up and scurried 
 around among the dunes, and tried to hide 
 the feet of the big purple hills of the distance. 
 The sun was pleasantly warm on the high 
 ground where we rode ; we had had the 
 nicest, politest little brush with the enemy, — 
 no one had been really hurt on either side 
 — and now we were going home. 
 
38 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 No I Troop, still in the advance, was 
 covering the ground to our right front in 
 extended formation. How queer theyi 
 looked— men and horses seeming at that 
 distance not much bigger than ants ! 
 
 What the deuce were they up to, anyway ? 
 Some of them on the extreme right of the 
 line had turned in and were galloping furi- 
 ously. Idiots ! working tired horses in that 
 
 way ! They ought to be Bang! Good 
 
 Lord ! ^gain ? Bang ! Bang ! How strangely 
 the shots sounded, muffled and unreal. 
 
 But they were real . Look ! 
 
 One of the galloping horses had collapsed 
 suddenly, and lay kicking. Its rider picked 
 himself up, ran forward a few paces, and 
 flung down again . The troops on the railway 
 line halted automatically. 
 
 A whistle blew and No. 3, just ahead of 
 us, trotted off in a cloud of sand. No. 2 
 picked up a signal from somewhere, and 
 moved off the line to the left. Still we 
 waited, torn with impatience. Ah ! A 
 mounted figure rode out of the press of 
 horsemen ahead. Followed the sound of a 
 whistle, faintly heard, and our turn, had come . 
 
 What a breathless scurry that was to where 
 the *' old man " was superintending affairs 
 
THE REAL THING 39 
 
 with his very best parade manner. I can 
 see him now, one hand thrust deep into a 
 breeches pocket, a pipe clamped firmly in 
 the angle of his jaw, and that damned enig- 
 matical smile of his, half hid by the drooping 
 moustache. I know, should he chance to 
 read these lines, that he will forgive the 
 adjective. Many phrases that are not in- 
 cluded in the vocabulary of nice, polite 
 people are sometimes used by common 
 soldiers as terms of endearment, and anyway, 
 his smile was — enigmatical . When he 
 praised — pccasions so rare as to be almost 
 negligible — it was there. And it was there 
 when he blamed, which, not unnaturally 
 perhaps, he often did. When, as at the 
 present, the squadron was under fire, the 
 smile grew almost animated. 
 
 " Number four ! "—the old man used to 
 drawl his words of command as though he 
 liked the sound of them—*' Number four, 
 action ri-ight ! " We were down and were 
 handing our reins to the horse -leaders before 
 he had got rid of the order. " This way, 
 men ! " Our troop officer was scrambling 
 down the slope in the direction of the 
 firing, and we plunged after, charging our 
 magazines as we ran. 
 
40 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 " There they are ! " Two horsemen were 
 galloping obliquely, across our front at about 
 eight hundred yards range. They were 
 unmistakably Germans^ and we flung our- 
 selves down and opened fire. At the third 
 shot, fired I think by a sergeant who was 
 sitting down to it a few yards to my right, 
 one of the figures collapsed forward on to 
 his horse's neck, but recovered and hung 
 on somehow, and at about eleven hundred 
 yards they disappeared behind the shoulder 
 of a sand-hill. 
 
 The sound of an occasional shot still came 
 up to us from the sand below, but the 
 " fun " must be nearly finished, for No. 3 
 Troop, on the rocks above and behind us, 
 had ceased fire. They knew, could see, 
 what was going on, whilst we, who were 
 within a hundred yards of what must have 
 been, to judge by the number of shots we 
 had heard, quite a brisk little scrap, could 
 see absolutely nothing. We scrambled on, 
 hoping desperately that everything was not 
 yet over. 
 
 We were on the fringe of the sand now, 
 and were beginning to see things. A man 
 — I recognized him as belonging to No. i — 
 was there, walking aimlessly about. He 
 
THE REAL THING 41 
 
 was hatless, he had no rifle, and he limped 
 as he moved. A few yards beyond him was 
 his horse, and from where it lay a yard -wide 
 spoor of blood ran down to the sand-hills, 
 a full hundred yards away. " Mind the chap 
 in the sand ! " It was the hatless one who 
 was shouting. " Oh, mind the chap in the 
 sand ! " There were several men " in the 
 sand." As far as I could see they looked 
 perfectly harmless . 
 
 One of them was lying flat on his back, 
 with his legs and arms grotesquely out- 
 flung, and as I looked there occurred a 
 phenomenon. From behind him there up- 
 rose a third hand and arm that waved 
 frantically for some moments and then 
 stopped and seemed to wait. Nothing 
 happened, and the rest of the man that 
 belonged to the spare hand and arm rose 
 to his feet and stood with both arms up- 
 held above his head — our first prisoner. 
 Ah, well ! The " fun " was over now, and 
 we could turn and reckon up the cost. 
 
 At the edge of the granite lay a man — 
 one of our men — shot through the heart. 
 Another man was kneeling over him, his 
 head down to the other's breast as if listening 
 for sound of life. With one hand he had 
 
42 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 commenced to loosen the other's collar ; in 
 the other he held, loosely, the strap of a 
 water-bottle. They were brothers, these two 
 men, and — they were both dead. Another 
 — mortally and hideously hurt — was holding 
 his wound with both hands. He was calling 
 out too, I remember. A fourth was being 
 carried up towards the railway line. His 
 leg was shattered at a few inches above the 
 knee, and as he passed he made some joking 
 allusion to his " rotten luck " — he was the 
 man wounded earlier in the morning at 
 Grasplatz. Twenty minutes later they came 
 down and told us that he, too, was dead. 
 
 One of the few kind things of war is the 
 little time given to one to think. There 
 are, of course, memories that one carries 
 away — memories of men writhing in agony ; 
 of men whom one had known and liked 
 making bestial noises while they died ; of 
 horses shattered and maimed, and looking 
 pitifully bewildered in their pain. But the 
 pictures are mercifully vague, blurred. The 
 brain, at such times, is too drunken with 
 excitement to do more than record the bare 
 facts . 
 
 And of the remainder of that day, my 
 memory can tell me no more than that, at 
 
THE REAL THING 43 
 
 some hour after dark, we got back to 
 Luderitzbucht, that it rained for some 
 time ( a fact unforgettable of G . S . W . ) ; 
 that some of the R.L.I, came up from 
 somewhere .and helped us to bury the 
 Germans ; and — that is about all. But stay ! 
 There is one other picture that is clear- 
 that of a dark-moustached, debonair man 
 lying propped up against a rock ; blood 
 mostly as to the breeches of him (he was 
 shot through the thigh), and utter uncon- 
 cemedness as to all the rest of him, from 
 his cheery smile to the cigarette that he airily 
 waved to illustrate some point or other to 
 the man who was bandaging him. This was 
 Captain De Meillon, Chief of the Intelli- 
 gence. His grave is somewhere out there 
 in the djesert (he was shot dead some months 
 later near the Aus Nek), and our easy task 
 it is to keep his memory green ; easy because 
 — ^well ! he was a fine soldier, but a finer 
 friend . 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 SANDSTORMS AND CEREMONIES 
 
 The burial-ground at Luderitzbucht affords 
 striking testimony of Teutonic thoroughness. 
 An area of some three hundred square yards 
 in extent, it contains within its neat 
 boundaries both cemetery and town rubbish - 
 heap. 
 
 True, the cinder and empty tin half is 
 quite distinctly marked off from the head- 
 stone half — the " God's Acre " of a grim 
 Lutheran humour — but, and it was not alone 
 the suggested " ptomanic " connection be- 
 tween the two ** departments " that influenced 
 us, we objected, strongly, and perhaps not 
 unnaturally, when, on the day after the fight 
 at Grasplatz, we were told to carry our dead 
 there. 
 
 It is not an aggressively cheerful place. 
 One can picture the spirit of the Father- 
 land doing the goose-step over it, spurred 
 heel gritting alternately in mounds of refuse 
 
SANDSTORMS— CEREMONIES 45 
 
 and on tombstone, saying : '* Here — here we 
 dump our waste material ! " 
 
 " Better," we argued, " to let our men lie 
 where they have fallen ! " but convention, 
 and a desire on the part of some command- 
 ing officer or other to ease himself of a neat 
 tribute to our " gallantry," prevailed, and 
 our first casualties lie now in mixed com- 
 pany. 
 
 We buried them on the afternoon of 
 September 27th, and the whole of the Central 
 Force came down to see us do it. We 
 formed a hollow square around the graves. 
 To the left of us were the R.L.I., and from 
 somewhere in the murk of sandstorm in front 
 of us the pipes of the Transvaal Scottish 
 wailed dirgefully. " A sandstorm with a 
 stomach-ache," some one called it, but we 
 were grateful, all the same, for their help. 
 To an outsider the scene would doubtless 
 have been impressive to a degree. The 
 sandstorm, the silent mass of khaki-clad 
 troops surrounding the white -surpliced figure 
 that droned of ashes and dust and was in- 
 audible because ashes and dust choked the 
 air into which he spoke, and because his 
 surplice stood out behind him and cracked 
 loudly in the grip of the buffeting wind ; 
 
46 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 the black, cumbersome German coffins, the 
 Lutheran pastor who stood quietly behind 
 awaiting his turn to bury the German dead 
 — we gave them a military funeral, too — 
 and the sobbing of the bagpipes. 
 
 Yes, it must have been impressive, but 
 to us, who were so near to things, it all 
 seemed vaguely unreal. They had died too 
 quickly, these men, for us to altogether 
 
 realize their going. C 's name had been 
 
 called out on roll-call that afternoon to attend 
 
 the funeral parade, and C was there 
 
 —in that long black box with the brass 
 plates and flowered handles. It was all very 
 uncomfortable and disillusioning, and we 
 were more than glad when the last spadeful 
 of earth had been beaten flat and the Scottish 
 pipes awoke and lilted us back to camp on 
 the heels of " Bonnie Dundee." 
 
 On the afternoon of the 28th we were 
 ordered to hold ourselves in readiness for 
 another night march to somewhere unknown, 
 and eight o'clock in the evening found us again 
 in the saddle. We knew more what to expect 
 on this occasion. Rumour sprang up and 
 told us that we were going to have another 
 try to bag the " garrison " of Fort Grasplatz, 
 and we were well content that it should be 
 
SANDSTORMS— CEREMONIES 47 
 
 so. We were indebted to the enemy for 
 some few vacancies in our mess, and, only 
 reasonably, we were anxious to settle the 
 little score. 
 
 One night ride is very like another. There 
 were the same low -voiced orders, the same 
 doling out of extra rounds of ammunition^ 
 the darkness was all -pregnant with just the 
 same vague possibilities. 
 
 There was one difference, however. No. 
 I Troop, somewhat to their disgust be it 
 said, were second in the order of formation. 
 They had been in the advance on the previous 
 occasion and had suffered, in consequence. 
 It was only fair, therefore, that some other 
 troop should be given the lead. No. 2 took 
 it, and the possibilities, and we moved off into 
 the night. 
 
 We did not take the route that we had 
 followed on the night of the 25th. Instead, 
 we struck into the hills, where the squadron 
 clattered over outcrops of bare granite where 
 horses stumbled and men fell, where, at 
 times, we wound in single file around 
 boulder -strewn ridges, or scrambled breath- 
 lessly down slopes of rock and sand that 
 were too steeply tilted to ride. 
 
 Sometimes — but this was when we had 
 
48 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 forsaken the noise and clatter of the 
 granite for the velvet silence of the sand- 
 dunes — the section in front of ours would 
 slither away down some unseen slope, and 
 before we could pull up to consider the 
 position we would avalanche down after 
 them, the horses sliding on their haunches 
 and the men hanging on somehow and 
 anyhow, or, if they became unseated, 
 tobogganing on their own. Not infre- 
 quently, when the squadron had safely nego- 
 tiated one of these slopes, we would look 
 back to discover one or more mounted 
 figures vainly endeavouring to force their 
 reluctant beasts to hazard the slide. A sec- 
 tion in rear would then hand over their 
 horses, double back to the sand-dunes, 
 scramble up somehow, and then two of the 
 men would link hands under the quarters 
 of the animal that was refusing the plunge, 
 and, at the instant risk of being kicked to 
 glory, literally hurl the astonished beast 
 forward and over the edge. 
 
 A low moon hung in the sky, and the 
 dunes stood up in a soft golden radiande 
 that was caught, here and there, in a gleam 
 of elusive silver, and, here and there, 
 smudged with inky shade where the flank 
 
SAiNDSTORMS— CEREMONIES 49 
 
 of some great sand-hill sloped steeply from 
 the moon's path. Usually, our guides led 
 us through the valleys of this great dune- 
 field, but not infrequently, when our further 
 progress was barred by some impasse of 
 sand, we would take to the higher ground, 
 to the crests of the dunes themselves, and 
 our path would lie by crumbling lip and 
 over hog -backed mounds where the white 
 dust rose like a mist around us and the 
 yielding sand gave knee -deep to our toiling 
 horses. 
 
 Heavy work this, and the morrow might 
 see us in desperate need of fresh horses. 
 The troops ahead of us dismounted in 
 response to some unheard command and 
 we rolled out of our saddles, glad to ease 
 the animals and to stretch our legs, cramped 
 with long riding. 
 
 For how many miles we walked that night 
 no one is likely to know, but although that 
 experience was to be the first of many, and 
 although we got used to it in the end, not 
 one of us is likely to forget that first weary 
 progress through the dune country. To say 
 that we were not suitably clad for marching 
 is to put it mildly. In addition to riding 
 breeches, and leggings, and spurs, over which 
 
 4 
 
50 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 tired men are apt to trip, we wore, each one 
 of us, a military greatcoat, two fally loaded 
 bandoliers (how those buckles hurt !), a 
 filled water-bottle, a mess -tin that clanked 
 mournfully to every movement, a haversack 
 crammed with bully beef and ship's biscuits, 
 and a bayonet that usually managed to get 
 in between one's legs at awkward moments ; 
 in addition we carried in one hand a rifle 
 that grew heavier as the slow miles fell be- 
 hind, and with the other dragged at the reins 
 of a horse that, being a horse, could not see 
 the sense of the proceedings, and wanted, 
 every hundred yards or so, to lie down and 
 rest. When the order came to halt and 
 " ring " our horses for what remained of the 
 night, we were too far gone even to realize 
 our relief. We just threw ourselves down 
 in heaps and slept untidily. 
 
 Exhaustion and the bitter cold fought over 
 our bivouac that night, and when grey- 
 footed dawn came shrinking among the 
 sandhills we were vividly awake, aching in 
 bone and mind. 
 
 These things pass, however, and before 
 the order to mount was given we had de- 
 rived a certain amount of enjoyment out of 
 the performance of our toilet, which con- 
 
SANDSTORMS— CEREMONIES 51 
 
 sisted of shaking as many pounds of damp 
 sand out of our clothing as was possible 
 without disrobing. 
 
 " Get mounted ! " The " old man " had 
 ridden past, and his was the mumbled order, 
 the words bitten off as if his jaws were frozen 
 — as they very possibly were. 
 
 Some of us, an inconsiderable minority, 
 got into the saddle at the first attempt. The 
 rest found, with a sort of numbed surprise, 
 that sleeping on damp, cold sand is not con- 
 ducive to that equestrian elan upon which, 
 as a squadron^ we prided ourselves. 
 
 One, G , notoriously short in the legs, 
 
 presented an amazing spectacle. He had 
 contrived somehow to get about half-way 
 up the side of his steep horse, and there 
 he hung, like an unhappy limpet, breathing 
 heavily, and trying, apparently, to mesmerize 
 himself into the saddle. Men in happier 
 positions than he strove to comfort him. 
 One unmerciful suggested that he should 
 start all over again, and another recom- 
 mended the hand - over - hand method of 
 swarming up the stirrup leather as being 
 both safe and picturesque. 
 
 A really pitiful sight, too, was our dear 
 old squadron sergeant-major. By virtue of 
 
52 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 his exalted office he was the owner of the 
 most imposing horse in the squadron, and 
 for the few minutes before a friendly 
 hand canted him up into the saddle from 
 behind, the old gentleman, who was not as 
 young as his attestation papers showed, 
 and was, besides, nearly doubled up with 
 cramp, looked as if he were going to break 
 down, and, as our amateur Irishman said 
 to me afterwards : " Not a blissed hand- 
 kerchief among the whole squadron iv us ! " 
 
 Our horses, poor beasts, were trembling 
 with cold, but they moved off briskly 
 enough, as if glad of the exercise, and by 
 the time that we had struggled into some 
 sort of formation they were going quite 
 easily. 
 
 Our bivouac, although we had not known 
 it, had lain on the very fringe of the dune- 
 field, and a few hundred yards brought us 
 out on to a hog-backed ridge of granitie 
 that to our right uplifted into larger hills, 
 and to our left dipped down into a hollow 
 on the farther side of which stood the 
 block-house of our previous acquaintance. 
 
 We gasped with surprise, but there was 
 no mistaking it. There, on the rusted corru- 
 gated iron, were the sprawling letters. We 
 
SANDSTORMS-CEREMONIES 53 
 
 spelt them out to make sure : '* F-o-r-t 
 G-r-a-s-p-1-a-t-z." On that moment of swift 
 joy, there came an order, back -flung from 
 somewhere in the advance, and we wheeled 
 sharply to the right. We ploughed through 
 a "vlei " of white sand. Another order — 
 it sounded like a bark — and we tumbled out 
 of our saddles and crawled, filled with an 
 unholy joy, to a fringe of rocks, and waited. 
 
 The squadron went straight on, the " old 
 man " riding a little to one side and in 
 advance. We saw him signal, and watched 
 breathlessly the miracle of precision that 
 followed. No. 2 Troop wheeled half -right, 
 No. I three-quarters left. No. 3 swept 
 straight on. They were within a few hundred 
 yards of the blockhouse now. Surely they 
 would be seen ! No I A hollow in the 
 ground took them, and we breathed again. 
 
 Where were the others? No. 2 we could 
 see. The men were dismounting and creep- 
 ing up the flank of a ridge of rock. No. i 
 had disappeared as completely as though 
 they had never been, and we could only 
 conjecture that they were somewhere in 
 the piled rocks to the left of the block- 
 house. Hullo I There was No. 3 again, on 
 the sky-line, and far beyond the "fort." 
 
54 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 The ** old man " knew what he was doing, 
 by Jove ! Fort Grasplatz now lay in the 
 centre of the squadron, and we snuggled 
 down and blew specks of sand from the 
 breeches of our rifles. 
 
 Our troop oflicer came and lay down be- 
 side me with a happy little sigh. 
 
 ** They won't get away from us this 
 time," he said, and focused his glasses on 
 the buildings. 
 
 Below the crest upon which we lay the 
 torn and twisted metals of the railway flung 
 a new note of colour into the lavish scheme 
 of sunrise. Teutonic thoroughness again ! 
 Every single section of rail was broken, the 
 twisted ends sticking grotesquely up into the 
 air, and below each a hollow in the sand 
 showed where the dynamite had been placed. 
 
 We did not know then what that railway 
 was to mean to us : of the months of wait- 
 ing that were to be ours, while the engineers 
 relaid the line and pushed it, bit by bit, 
 painfully, farther into the desert ; of the 
 blockhouses that were to spring up beside 
 its reconstructed length ; and of the weary 
 vigil that was to be the portion of the infantry 
 throughout that campaign of thirst and 
 blistering sandstorm. 
 
SANDSTORMS— CEREMONIES 55 
 
 For the moment all our ambition and 
 interest in life was centred in that group of 
 tin sheds across the hollow, and already we 
 began to sense that ours had been a fool's 
 errand ; that " Fort Grasplatz " had not been 
 re -occupied by the enemy, and that, after 
 all, there was to be no " fun." 
 
 Two minutes later we were sure. A 
 crouching figure appeared for an instant 
 among the rocks on the farther side of the 
 fort, and was gone again so quickly that it 
 seemed like a trick of the eyesight. Another, 
 and then another, and there, below the sheds, 
 a group of three or four more. 
 
 " Don't fire ! They're our fellows." The 
 warning was unnecessary. In that clear light 
 it was possible not only to see that they 
 were our men, but also, in some cases, to 
 recognize individuals. 
 
 ''Look! There's old M ." (M 
 
 was a sergeant of No. 3, notable chiefly, 
 perhaps, for his dignity of manner.) At 
 that distance, and on all fours behind a rock, 
 he looked amazingly like a rabbit, and an 
 infectious giggle from somewhere down the 
 ridge was caught up by the line, and 
 enlarged into open laughter. 
 
 A few seconds later Mi was seen to 
 
56 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 be on his feet, making desperate efforts in 
 the wake of a rush of men on the block- 
 house. We saw them coerce the door with 
 a rifle -butt, saw one man hoisted by a com- 
 panion through an open window, and 
 watched while what looked like a pair of 
 boots was thrown out. Followed a shower 
 of miscellaneous articles impossible to dis- 
 tinguish, and our officer rose to his feet, 
 with the light of battle in his eyes. " Loot ! " 
 he observed shortly. " Get mounted ! " 
 
 There is not much more to be said of our 
 second attack on Fort Grasplatz. A note 
 in my diary sums up the affair into the 
 words, *' Breakfasted on the remains of our 
 previous loot," and that was really all that 
 happened. 
 
 Our first month or six weeks in the 
 German South -West saw several such 
 " attacks," and we used to draw up pro- 
 grammes that told how " on October — D 
 Squadron, I.L.H., will recapture Fort Gras- 
 platz, under the management of Lieut. -Col. 
 D— Ids— n. All bioscope rights reserved ! " 
 
 The " old man " really did seem to de- 
 velop an amazing affection for surrounding 
 those empty sheds. We, of course, used 
 to humour him, and nothing could have 
 
SANDSTORMS— CEREMONIES 57 
 
 exceeded the gravity with which we would, 
 time after time, follow him through a 
 night march in pursuit of his hobby, nor 
 surpassed the spirit with which we used to 
 storm the fort under his benign approval. 
 
 On this occasion, however, the game was 
 still delightfully new, and if we grumbled 
 at all, it was mainly because No. 3 Troop 
 had collared a case of tinned milk, and had 
 omitted to share it round. It was in things 
 of this kind that the war was brought home 
 to us. 
 
 On our way back to Luderitzbucht we rode 
 across the fringe of sand where the Germans 
 had ambushed our advance screen only three 
 days before. Of that brisk little encounter 
 we had carried away a very vivid picture^ 
 and we were morbidly curious to see again 
 the festoon of dead horses and to point out 
 to each other where So-and-so had fallen, 
 and where this or that German had lain. 
 
 Here was the spur of rock beside which 
 
 E had crouched while he shot the 
 
 German who had shot his horse, and here, 
 
 round this corner Hullo I Where were 
 
 the horses, and — but this could not be the 
 place, surely? And yet, and yet these 
 were unmistakably the rocks behind which 
 
58 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 the enemy had' lain in wait for us. Then 
 what in the name of all that was wonder- 
 ful was this sea of sand-dunes doing here? 
 Three days before this had been a level plain 
 of white sandj and now 
 
 We rode on, silent with wonder. No. 2 
 Troop, a hundred yards or so in the ad- 
 vance, halted, and we could see that the 
 head of every man was turned to the 
 right. They were staring curiously at 
 something that we could not see, and we 
 crowded in on the heels of their horses., 
 Ah ! So that was the explanation. From 
 the flank of the straggling sand-dunes before 
 us there protruded the quarters and stiffly 
 outstretched hind legs of a horse. 
 
 A breeze that was to grow later into a 
 pukka sandstorm was driving a fine mist 
 of sand over the crest of the dune, and 
 while we watched a steady, ceaseless 
 stream of sand slid gently down its flank, 
 and quite perceptibly added to the grave 
 of the poor animal beneath. A week 
 later, when we again visited the place, a 
 contrary wind had sent the dunes back 
 whence they had come, and the sun-dried, 
 shrunken bodies of the horses blistered the 
 landscape, plain for all to see. 
 
SANDSTORMS— CEREMONIES 59 
 
 Wander-dunen of the Germans, ye are 
 fitly named indeed. In that grim desert land, 
 where is neither beast nor bird, your wind- 
 sown graves perform at least a vagrant office 
 over poor carrion that lies by the way — 
 grisly milestones that mark man's con- 
 quest of desert and of fellow -man — carrion 
 untended else, till, bleached and dried by 
 wind and sun, it moves to the lightest touch, 
 and, finally, is broken up and frayed to dust 
 and follows after the restless, changing 
 winds, leaving only a pile of gleaming bones 
 to mark the spot. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 SIGHTS AND SMELLS 
 
 The week that followed upon our second 
 taking of Fort Grasplatz brought us a 
 passing interest in new arrivals : the Natal 
 Carbineers, the Pretoria Regiment, the 
 Kaffrarian Rifles, a battery of the Natal 
 Field Artillery, the Eastern Rifles, the ist 
 Kimberley Regiment, and— it was whispered 
 — a brand-new Brigadier with a brand-new 
 Staff to match. 
 
 A bare note in my diary states simply 
 that they came. Of the order of their 
 coming is no mention, but then, not even 
 official records, I believe, could have lucidly 
 sustained the sandstorm that snarled over 
 Luderitzbucht throughout the whole of that 
 infernal week. Through it were caught 
 glimpses, here and there, of herds of bag- 
 gage-laden infantry being driven to allot- 
 ted camping -grounds ; of spick-and-span 
 
 Carbineers striving desperately to maintain 
 
 60 
 
SIGHTS AND SMELLS 6i 
 
 the dignity of their spurs— and almost suc- 
 ceeding ; of kicking mules and cursing 
 drivers ; strings of horses, wagons, guns, 
 more drivers (still cursing), native scouts, 
 poultice -wallopers (courtesy title of the 
 S.A.M.C), and all the rag -tag and bob- 
 tail of our amateur army. 
 
 A hard-bitten company of the Veterinary 
 Corps drifted down upon us, and asked if 
 
 there was beer : they had heard . We 
 
 told them. Yes ; there was beer, but there 
 was none now. We were sorry. Where- 
 upon, and without enthusiasm, they said 
 that it didn't matter, and drifted away, 
 still searching. Others, but these were of 
 the infantry, forlorn units blown from all 
 knowledge of their whereabouts, we found 
 huddled under the lee of buildings. They 
 bleated at us joylessly, and asked many 
 questions. Was this a sandstorm? Were 
 there many Germans about? and — but this 
 was inevitable and unvaried— had we found 
 many diamonds? 
 
 We would usually tell them that our kit- 
 bags could hold no more, whereupon they 
 would break down and beg to be taken 
 back to their regiments. We did not, of 
 course, entertain the slightest knowledge of 
 
62 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 their regiments' whereabouts, but, as some- 
 thing was obviously expected of us, we 
 would indicate variously all four points of 
 the compass, and they would thank us effu- 
 sively and merge away, one by one, into the 
 muffled landscape. 
 
 Sandstorms, however, do not last for ever, 
 and there came at last a day when the un- 
 changed hills looked down upon neat acres 
 of canvas and a new and startling activity. 
 All of our immediate world was become .a 
 geometric pattern. Wagons, scores upon 
 scores of them, stood axle to axle in a fault- 
 less precision that led the eye along ruled 
 lines to ordered rows of water-carts and 
 tethlered mules. A group of these last had 
 broken loose, and half a dozen mathemati- 
 cians with long -handled whips were chasing 
 them back into equational order. Beyond, 
 again, right-angled horse lines and a criss- 
 cross pattern of tents which was the Natal 
 Carbineers' camp played with the Natal 
 Field Artillery's 15 -pounders at being an 
 Euclidic proposition. Which, of course, was 
 absurd . 
 
 It has somewhere been said that an Army 
 represents the only true democracy. This 
 is not true. Nowhere is there so nice a class 
 
SIGHTS AND SMELLS 63 
 
 distinction as in the Army, and nowhere, 
 perhaps, is that nicety; so candidly main- 
 tained. We, the LL.H., would not at that 
 time have even dreamed of visiting the 
 infantry,, but we called upon the Carbineers 
 because, simply, they were '* mounted men,'* 
 and as such our equals . Later, months later, 
 out of the common thirst and the sandstorms 
 — all men are alike in a sandstorm — there 
 grew the reluctant conviction that active 
 service brings to pass a sort of socialistic 
 millennium in which regiments are judged 
 only by their performances, and in which 
 officers may at times speak quite respectfully 
 to their men, and men almost respectfully 
 of their officers. That the moral of the 
 mounted man is usually superior to that of 
 the '* foot-slogger " may be attributed solely 
 to the superior moral of the horse that he 
 rides. This last is an epigram, but true. 
 The Natal Field Artillery, too, were on 
 our visiting list, and we found them to be 
 excellent fellows. We swapped lies with 
 them ; we pronounced their guns to be the 
 loot of some museum: — they were not, 
 certainly, of the newest type — and we 
 greedily borrowed all the newspapers that 
 they had brought with them. 
 
64 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 It was in the N.F.A. lines, by. the way, 
 one white-hot noon, that I almost tripped 
 over the super -philosopher. He was Irish, 
 which perhaps makes his philosophy the 
 less remarkable, and he sate upon an up- 
 turned soap-box and toyed with a dish 
 of something that sounded like camp 
 stew. 
 
 There was a sudden noise, the sort of 
 noise that makes a grown-up say to a child : 
 " You should put your hand before your 
 mouth when you do that ! " and I heard, 
 rather than saw, the super -philosopher clear 
 his mouth of some objectionable morsel. I 
 looked round, and his pale eye closed with 
 mine. " Praise th' saints ! " he said, '* thim 
 ants have no bones into thim ! " 
 
 Our interest in the arrivals did not last 
 long. A new sandstorm blew up and 
 swallowed them, and when, weeks later, it 
 spat them out again, they had all but lost 
 their identity as far as we were concerned. 
 The infantry became known to us simply as 
 " foot-sloggers " ; the Carbineers, from a 
 weakness for polishing their riding-boots, 
 became " the Cherry Blossom Brigade " ; 
 and we, the I.L.H., were known to. all and 
 sundry as the " Ilhcit Liquor Hunters." I 
 
SIGHTS AND SMELLS 65 
 
 do not think, however, that we should have 
 mindied so much if there had been any 
 liquor left to hunt. 
 
 We were kept hard at work, too, and we 
 soon learned that the ** in-betweens " were 
 more profitably, to be spent in what we called 
 " blanket -drill," and what our N.C.O.'s, 
 when they were not indulging in it them- 
 selves, called " darned laziness," than in 
 afternoon calls upon strangers who had 
 so thoroughly taken upon themselves the 
 colour of their surroundings as to have 
 become as supremely uninteresting as 
 ourselves . 
 
 The deep groaning noise that a trumpet 
 makes at dawn, and which field-officers and 
 poets call " reveille," and turn over again 
 and snore at, when, by some rare chance, 
 they hear it, was to us the first note in a 
 symphony of labour that was to last all day. 
 •Who has heard the howls of execration 
 that uprise from a sleeping camp at its 
 first note will appreciate the truth of what 
 I say. The utter hopelessness of any resist- 
 ance to its summons is, perhaps, what galls 
 most. Turn you never so deaf an ear, you 
 will still have the chilling conviction that 
 some N.C.O., with more liver than bowels 
 
 5 
 
66 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 of compassion, is waiting " outside " to 
 mark you down as an absentee from roll- 
 call. 
 
 Reveille, roll-call, arms inspection, morn- 
 ing stables, alleged breakfast, stable fatigue, 
 mounted squadron drill, watering and feed- 
 ing horses, and musketry instruction took us 
 by gentle stages as far as lunch -time. After 
 lunch (save the mark ! but is sand, disguised 
 as Irish stew, lunch?), Swedish drill, sectional 
 skirmishing on foot, and an odd quarter- 
 master's fatigue or so thrown in, would lead 
 us on to evening stables. That accom- 
 plished, we were at liberty — those, at least, 
 of us who were not on guard for the night 
 — to prepare our evening meal and to retire 
 to our blankets, where, masters of ourselves 
 at last, we could — the writer certainly did on 
 one occasion — dream that one-eyed camels 
 of malevolent aspect chased us through inter- 
 minable leagues of sandstorm, and finally 
 drove us into seas of greasy Irish stew, 
 wherefrom emerged horrid shapes that 
 lectured us on the care of rifles and the 
 virtues of discipline. 
 
 How we longed for war, if only for its 
 comparative peace ! 
 
 Not all our days were grey days, however. 
 
SIGHTS AND SMELLS 67 
 
 There came a period when each morning 
 saw us, clad mainly in pipes and towels, 
 taking our horses down to a landlocked arm 
 of the sea, where the hills stood up in their 
 glory around us, and where flamingoes, in 
 their stately phalanxes, waded the still 
 shallows or flung in broad-pinioned ease to 
 some further sand -hank ; where black seals 
 bobbed greeting to us from the dipping 
 waters, and where we could forget the 
 sandstorms of yesterday and to-morrow. 
 
 Horses, we found, made excellent diving 
 boards, and lent themselves, besides, to a 
 type of chariot -racing that I have not met 
 elsewhere. For this form of sport it is 
 essential to have two horses, and it usually 
 became one's painful duty, therefore, to 
 borrow the mount of some other man, 
 preferably a non -swimmer, when he was not 
 looking, and then to make for deep water 
 — where he could not follow — with as little 
 delay as possible. Remained then only to 
 so contrive oneself as to stand with a foot 
 on the back of each animal, and to keep 
 them swimming sufficiently near together 
 to allow one to retain some sort of balance. 
 Sometimes one would succeed, but usually, 
 and in spite of extreme efforts, the contrary 
 
68 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 beasts would swim more and more widely 
 apart, until overtaxed powers of doing the 
 splits would end in a ducking as ignomin- 
 ious as inevitable. 
 
 I remember an occasion when, after a 
 long and tiring patrol, we had ridden our 
 horses into the shallows to cool their legs, a 
 school of ground -sharks suddenly appeared, 
 almost literally, under their very noses. 
 The White Knight in '* Alice in Wonder- 
 land," who made his horse wear spiked 
 anklets against the danger of shark -bite, 
 must have foreseen some such contingency ; 
 but then, had he been with us, he would 
 have fallen off, I feel sure, in the smother 
 of spray and panic which the experience 
 cost us. 
 
 One of our duties at this time was the 
 providing of an e3Cort to the water ration 
 that left Luderitzbucht each morning for 
 Kolmanskoppe . 
 
 The water was taken in mule -drawn 
 trolleys along the railway line (we possessed 
 no other ** rolling stock " at that time) and 
 as it was the sole supply of the two infantry 
 regiments stationed there, extreme care had 
 to be taken to prevent its being intercepted 
 by a stray German patrol. 
 
SIGHTS AND SMELLS 69 
 
 On October 7 No. 3 Troop had supplied 
 the convoy, and we, whose turn it was to 
 do so on the morrow, had spent the greater 
 part of the day, in the sweet frame of mind 
 that is bred by camp fatigues, and at four 
 o'clock in the afternoon were waiting for 
 the order to " break away " from a squad- 
 ron drill that seemed as if it would never 
 end. The other troops had dismissed long 
 ago, and we asked ourselves with some 
 bitterness why we should be kept out in the 
 heat and sand playing at circuses, and all 
 the while the sharp words of command 
 stabbed through the curtain of dust that 
 followed U3, and punctuated our grumbling. 
 ** On the left fo-orm troop ! " Some one, 
 hand-jostled by a section in rear, cursed 
 aloud, and we laughed as we went forward 
 at the picturesque phrase he had used. 
 " Sections right ! " The sand -fog rose more 
 thickly about us. Was this farce never 
 going to end? '* Ha-alt ! " Ah ! This was 
 the order for which we had been waiting. 
 The '' dismiss " would follow, and there was 
 still time if we hurried for a bathe before 
 evening stables. 
 
 But our O.C. had apparently forgotten us. 
 He was gazing with something of an air 
 
70 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 of abstraction at a solitary horseman 
 making towards us from the direction of 
 the camp . 
 
 There was nothing really extraordinary 
 in the sight of that figure (we could 
 recognize him, by the big, upstanding grey 
 that he rode, as the Colonel's orderly), 
 yet something — his obvious hurry perhaps 
 — made us forget our anxiety to be 
 dismissed . 
 
 A minute later he had pulled up before 
 our troop leader. " Colonel D n's com- 
 pliments, sir ! and you are to report to him 
 at once ! " And then, in the confidential 
 tone that orderlies learn from their constant 
 association with the higher ranks : " Water 
 guard, sir ! " I could just catch the words : 
 *' . . . German patrol . . . one . . . 
 chap wounded. . . . What's that, sir ? . . . 
 Yes, one of our fellows." 
 
 " Sections right ! Wa-alk 'arch ! Tr-r-ot ! " 
 There was life in the order this time, and 
 there was life, too, in our quick response. 
 The horses even seemed to be infected, 
 and we had to hold them a little as we 
 pounded along in the wake of the news- 
 bringer . 
 
 " Steady, there ! Ye don't want to ride 
 
SIGHTS AND SMELLS 71 
 
 the sentries down, do ye?" The camp 
 buildings had leaped out at us from the 
 yellow haze of our own progress, and the 
 corporal of the guard had flattened himself 
 against a wall — just in time. We pulled up 
 and rode in soberly. Men of other troops 
 dashed at us and held our horses. " Lucky 
 devils I " they said, and bade us get our 
 bandoliers and rifles . From them we learned 
 that a German patrol had lain in wait for 
 the water convoy at a point some three miles 
 up the line, had potted one of our men 
 through the thigh, and had retired without 
 our fellows being able to fire a shot in 
 exchange, and now, we — " lucky 4," they 
 called us — were going out to hunt them. 
 ** And I don't suppose they've gone far," one 
 informed me. " I expect they'll be waiting 
 for you, an' p'raps they'll shoot one of you. 
 I know I hope they will — you lucky, lucky 
 devils ! " 
 
 Into the press of chaff and counter -chaff, 
 and the excitement of straps and buckles, 
 rode one, speaking with the large voice 
 of small authority, and hung about with 
 " the complete campaigner's outfit." Not 
 a detail — if we except the camp -stretcher 
 and the cork -mattress — was missing. Water- 
 
72 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 bottle, haversack, prismatic compass, field- 
 glasses, first aid outfit, and sand goggles — 
 the White Knight again ! 
 
 As a quick-change artist he should have 
 commanded our ready admiration. As it 
 was, he provided just that sobering touch 
 of humour that we needed. " Go in' to take 
 all week to get ready?" he queried with 
 that heavy urbanity which N.C.O.'s and 
 stage managers mistake for satire, " . . . 
 passel o' ladies' maids ! " 
 
 " Oh ! you — you May queen ! " I heard 
 some one say, and the troop giggled help- 
 lessly as we swung into our saddles. 
 " Number off from the right ! " the order 
 was barked at us. 
 
 " One " — '' two " — " three " . The 
 
 fourth man was having trouble with his pony 
 and was far too busy to think of mere 
 numbers, and the White Knight glared down 
 the line of us as if, in some way, just out- 
 side his comprehension, we were all to blame. 
 '* As you were ! " he snapped — it sounded 
 like " Zwear " ! " Number off from the 
 
 ri " "No time for that now, Sergeant ! " 
 
 spoke the crisp voice of the O.C. from some- 
 where behind us. " Sections left I Walk 
 march ! Tr-r-ot ! " and the quick dust rose 
 
SIGHTS AND SMELLS jz 
 
 to the forward surge of horses and men, 
 and we were off. 
 
 Five minutes later we had passed the out- 
 lying pickets of the Transvaal Scottish, and 
 were kicking up the sand at a good hand- 
 canter along the hill -girt railway line to 
 Kolmanskuppe. There is a peculiar exhila- 
 ration in this form of sport (I cannot easily 
 use the term " warfare " in regard to a game 
 wherein all that is ordinarily known as 
 *' patriotism " is swallowed up and lost in a 
 wholesome, primal, man's desire to hunt man 
 — the royalest of royal game — for the sake, 
 only, of the game's lust), and if in G.S.W. 
 we were rather like the famous American 
 hunter who had never been known to kill 
 anything, but who " just hunted " — well, 
 such little killing as did come our way proved 
 conclusively that " just hunting " held all 
 the breathless joy of the thing and left no — 
 aftertaste. 
 
 For some miles we held our pace, and 
 the heavy, springless sand through which 
 we rode flung its yellow veil about us. 
 There was the sound of wind in our ears, 
 and the creaking of saddle - leather, a 
 vague surging noise, as of a heavy ground- 
 swell sucking through rocks, and, over all. 
 
74 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 the choking, blinding pall of dust. An 
 oath, back -flung from a leading section 
 where a horse had stumbled, sounded 
 smothered and unreal. Now and again an 
 outcrop of bare granite would leap out 
 to meet us, and the brief thunder of our 
 passing would shout back from the echoing 
 hills ; then sand again, and its muflled 
 tumult. 
 
 The valley became narrower, and a hint 
 of coolness stole down the sudden shadows. 
 All on a moment a swift hand plucked the 
 sunlight from us, and the jaws of the hills 
 closed suddenly about our path— closed, 
 closed, until the ribbon of steel that we knew 
 to be the railway line looked like a tongue 
 lolling from the cleft grin before us. There 
 was a silence in that place, and our horses 
 pricked quick, apprehensive ears to it. 
 " What a place for an ambush ! " said some 
 one of my section, and the angry '* Don't be 
 a fool ! " of the man to whom he had spoken 
 showed that three of us, at least, were think- 
 ing of the same thing. The click of a steel- 
 shod hoof striking against stone, and — 
 " click ! " back would come the answer of 
 the rocks ; just the sort of noise that the 
 bolt of a Mauser rifle makes when it is 
 
SIGHTS AND SMELLS 75 
 
 drawn back to Well, speaking per- 
 sonally, I do not suppose that I should have 
 noticed it if my horse hadn't jumped so. 
 
 It was here, or hereabouts, that our patrol 
 had been fired on only a few hours beforei, 
 and we had received no particular assurance 
 that ours was not likely to be a similar ex- 
 perience. On the contrary, every breathing 
 instant was pregnant with possibility, and, 
 be it said, a sort of half -shrinking hope. 
 
 A barrier of great boulders, through which 
 the line won a bare clearance, stood suddenly 
 up against us. Just the place for an ambush ; 
 but nothing happened save, perhaps, that 
 one was conscious more of one's own breath- 
 ing after it was passed. A hundred yards 
 or so farther on the hills to our right fell 
 away in a great curve, and sheeted sunlight 
 lay on all the place ; orange, streaked with 
 silver of drift -sand on the shining plain, 
 while beyond, and high above all, white - 
 faced crags swam on an opal -hearted mist. 
 To our right a mad sunset flared above the 
 purple -footed hills, and pointed long, scorn - 
 fill, shadow - fingers at us. Sunset? or 
 drunken magic? Saffron there was, and 
 duck's-egg green lying on amber ; amber 
 that dripped molten gold, and tipped with 
 
76 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 splendid colour the peaks which stood up 
 blackly against it ; amber, shot with blush- 
 rose and slashed with fierce scarlet : a 
 breathless wonder that changed while we 
 watched it — changed and deepened until 
 all the painted sky was a blood -clotted 
 glory. 
 
 Night had stepped into the valley in 
 which we rode, and I was not sorry when 
 my section was picked out for " flanking 
 work," and we were sent at a sharp trot to 
 the foot-hills and the sunlight. We were 
 told to keep slightly in advance of the 
 troop, and, as the broken nature of the 
 ground allowed, about three hundred yards 
 distant from the railway line, the idea being, 
 of course, that should an enemy patrol be 
 waiting for us among the rocks, we — " the 
 advance screen " — would draw their fire, and 
 so secure some measure of safety for our 
 main body. A leading section was sent off 
 to the shadow -land on the right of the line, 
 and, looking back when we had ridden some 
 hundred yards or so, I saw two other sections 
 detach themselves from the main body, and 
 drop back, to the right and left respectively, 
 as a sort of extended rear-guard. 
 
 " As the nature of the ground allowed " I 
 
SIGHTS AND SMELLS 77 
 
 The words were the letter of our instruc- 
 tions ; the exclamation mark, as Punch 
 might say, was ours when the first gentle 
 slope that we negotiated jumped suddenly 
 up into a hog-backed " krantz," that looked 
 as if it might strain even a klipspringer. 
 It had to be done, however, and we laid 
 ourselves on our horses' necks and let them 
 go at it. What a breathless scramble it 
 was ! Loose shale avalanched about us, and 
 steel -shod hoofs slipped and struck, and 
 struck and slipped again on the crisp granite, 
 and just when it seemed to me that 
 nothing was left but to dismount and pull 
 my horse up after me, there was a last, 
 furious straining of willing muscles, a 
 plunge that shook my hat over my eyes, 
 and the four of us were landed in a hard- 
 breathing bunch on a sort of shelf of rock. 
 A girth had slipped, and we paused while 
 it was tightened, and looked back. The 
 troop was halted — while we attained our 
 position, I supposed — and as we watched, a 
 figure rode clear of the others and signalled 
 agitatedly to us to advance. 
 
 It was comparatively easy, from our eleva- 
 tion, to select a route that conformed measur- 
 ably to our instructions and to the opposing 
 
78 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 factor of our own instinct of self-preserva- 
 tion. Only comparatively easy, however, 
 because distances that looked flat, or, at the 
 most, but gently tilted, proved on closer 
 inspection to be almost worth the serious 
 consideration of an Alpine Club. But we 
 managed to scramble along somehow. 
 When possible, we even went farther into 
 the spirit of our instructions, and rode in 
 extended formation, but, although our horses 
 displayed an amazing aptitude for rock -work, 
 we usually found ourselves progressing in 
 single file. Once, I remember, when a flat 
 surface of rock tempted us to something 
 approaching a trot, we pulled up only a 
 few yards short of where the hill ended 
 abruptly, and lay, piled about its own foot, 
 hundreds of feet below. It was from there, 
 too, that we first caught sight of the white 
 buildings of Kolmanskuppe, some two or 
 three miles away, but although it was a 
 cheering sight, we went on from that place 
 with much sedateness and circumspection. 
 All serious thought of meeting the enemy 
 patrol had vanished, of course, with that 
 first glimpse of " civilization." Only one 
 ordeal now remained : to get ourselves down, 
 out of that region of sunlight and breath- 
 
SIGHTS AND SMELLS 79 
 
 lessness, to where, with the lesser hills, began 
 the last phase of our journey. 
 
 One attempt landed us in a cul-de-sac of 
 tumbled granite, another on a tongue of 
 rock that would have proved perfectly 
 negotiable if the tongue had not been bitten 
 short, or if there had been a bridge across 
 the forty-foot chasm that grinned up at us ; 
 but, eventually, by winding in single file 
 round a spur of rock where a false step 
 meant— as one of us said and giggled so 
 much at, that he all but put his assertion 
 to the proof — " more than a bad cold " for 
 the man who slipped, we found a steep 
 slope wheredown we tobogganed with safety 
 and some amusement to ourselves, but not 
 a little detriment, I think, to the tails of our 
 horses . 
 
 The troop, we found, had taken courage 
 of the less imposing scenery, and were just 
 visible in a cloud of dust some half a mile 
 ahead of us. Just outside Kolmanskuppe 
 the railway line takes a sharp bend to the 
 left, and as half a mile in the rear does 
 not exactly correspond with the M.I. hand- 
 book's definition of an advance guard's 
 position, we kicked up our tired animals and 
 made a desperate effort, by cutting across 
 
So WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 the angle of the hne, to regain some measure 
 of dignity. What the troop thought when, 
 some ten minutes later, we reappeared in 
 advance of them, I do not know. Th^y: 
 looked rather indifferent, I thought, and 
 when, soon afterwards, a ragged fringe of 
 infantry appeared on the sky-line above us — 
 Kolmanskuppie is on the edge of the desert 
 proper, and looks as if it had been washed 
 up by the sea of mountainous sand-dunes — 
 and the troop, realizing apparently that there 
 was really no need to follow its meticulous 
 course along the railway metals, wheeled 
 sharply to the right, we cantered down and, 
 with all humility, tied ourselves on to its 
 tail. 
 
 In the number of its houses, Kolmans- 
 kuppe is not a large place ; in the extent 
 covered by such buildings as there are it 
 is quite considerable. An average distance 
 of about one hundred yards between the 
 houses, and the glaring monotony of their 
 design stifles any desire on the part of the 
 visitor unduly to prolong his tour of in- 
 spection . 
 
 In the ordinary sense we were not, of 
 course, visitors, and besides, we had " done " 
 Kolmanskuppe, more thoroughly than an 
 
SIGHTS AND SMELLS 8i 
 
 American tourist does Rome, on a previous 
 occasion. Then, we had been actuated by 
 other than guide-book motives, and now, its 
 interest gone, the place was become an 
 eyesore, and we wanted to go home. That, 
 we supposed, was why we got the order to 
 off-saddle. 
 
 The one picturesque touch in the picture 
 was supplied by our three camels. They 
 were there on some water-carrying pretext, 
 and they recognized us from afar off, and 
 came and stood to windward of us so that 
 there could be no remote possibility of our 
 not recognizing them. 
 
 We never seemed, somehow, to be able 
 to get away from those three gaunt beasts. 
 No matter the direction of our journeyings, 
 we always met them sooner or later. We 
 should not, of course, have minded if they 
 had shown any signs of awakening affection 
 for us, but they didn't. It was their 
 sneering indifference to our presence that 
 galled us most, I think. Had we been in 
 the habit of thrusting ourselves upon them, 
 this attitude would have been understand- 
 able, even commendable ; but we didn't 
 thrust ourselves upon them. They hatched 
 deliberate plots to meet us in unexpected 
 
 6 
 
82 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 places, and when we met they sneered at 
 us, and besides, as I have said elsewhere, 
 they smelt abominably. In very truth, 
 Tartarin of Tarascon was not more haunted 
 by his own camel than were we by our three . 
 
 The corporal who was in charge of them 
 slouched to us from somewhere out of the 
 desert — he was borrowing habits right and 
 left from his camels, we often told him — 
 and gave us the cheerful information that 
 we were to convoy some wagons back to 
 Luderitzbucht, which wagons, he added, 
 were only then being off-loaded. Dusk was 
 spreading like a grey blanket across the face 
 of the sands, and the prospect of a night 
 ride at the tail of a string of creaking wagons 
 was not enticing. We asked him how 
 he knew, and he retired into his newly 
 acquired camelism, and went off to his 
 uncouth beasts. 
 
 But he was right, and an hour later saw 
 us — or heard us rather, for it was pitch 
 dark — starting on such a ride as I hope 
 never again to suffer. The road from 
 Kolmanskuppe to Luderitzbucht is rendered 
 distinct from the country through which it 
 runs by means of white -painted paraffin 
 tins placed at irregular intervals along its 
 
SIGHTS AND SMELLS 83 
 
 alleged sides. That it does not otherwise 
 differ to any marked extent from the sur- 
 rounding country is due less, I think, to 
 the surveyor than to the country, which is 
 mainly precipices and small but very 
 knobby hills. I have since travelled that 
 road in the daytime, and its unrelieved 
 roughness — unless an occasional wallow in 
 deep sand can be called relief — makes of it 
 a thing to be remembered ; but of that 
 night, when our nostrils, and our throats, 
 and our eyes were filled with the dust 
 kicked up by close upon a hundred mules 
 and half as many horses, and our ears were 
 deafened by the harsh thunder of empty 
 wagons bouncing into and out of deep holes 
 and over fire -spitting granite boulders, 
 recollection is a mere headache. 
 
 For the first half-mile or so — my section 
 had now become the rearguard — we rode at 
 some fifty yards behind the last wagon. 
 We did this for several reasons : firstly, 
 because the air was less full of dust at 
 that distance ; secondly, because we could 
 more or less select our own pace instead 
 of having, every now and then, to pull our 
 horses back upon their haunches to avoid 
 spitting them on the brake handle of a 
 
84 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 wagon stopped suddenly, in its drunken 
 career by, virtue of collision with some 
 more than usually imposing obstruction ; 
 and thirdly — but this I do not think was a 
 real reason — because we had been ordered 
 to do so. 
 
 We were going down some unseen slope, 
 I remember, when the change occurred. 
 My horse was plunging a good deal, and 
 I had to use both hands to prevent his 
 getting away from me. The man on my 
 right seemed to be having similar difficulty 
 with his animal. Strange ! they were all 
 
 quiet enough a minute ago, and now 
 
 " Look out ! " The words were shot at me 
 by No. 3 of the section as, with his horse 
 completely out of control, he raced passed me 
 into the darkness and the dust. " Rumtny," 
 said the man on my right, " I don't know 
 what's the matter with the beasts. They're 
 scared out of their lives, that I'll swear — 
 Good Lord ! " His ejaculation was spoken 
 away from me, for his pony had swung 
 suddenly about with a quick, frightened 
 movement, and was now staring into the 
 blackness fnom whence we had come. A 
 moment later and my own beast had spun 
 around. We waited in silence. 
 
SIGHTS AND SMELLS 85 
 
 ** Where's T ? " said the other man 
 
 suddenly. (T was of my section, and 
 
 I seemed vaguely to remember that he had 
 teen riding behind us.) If my memory was 
 
 right, then T was somewhere out there 
 
 in the blackness, and the — the — whatever 
 it was that was frightening our horses was 
 out there with him. It was not a nice 
 thought. We waited again, and I found 
 myself wondering what it would sound like 
 
 to call out T 's name, when out of the 
 
 darkness came the sound of a snort, fol- 
 lowed by what seemed like the frenzied 
 plunging of some heavy beast. Then a 
 voice uplifted itself in earnest supplica- 
 tion, and the voice was the voice of T . 
 
 He seemed to be calling upon the name 
 of a god not altogether orthodox. I 
 caught, here and there, strong expressions 
 of his disapproval of some person or thing. 
 The voice was growing louder and clearer, 
 
 and it became obvious that T was 
 
 being borne towards us at a high rate of 
 speed. The pale sheet of the sky held him 
 in silhouette for an instant, and then he 
 flung down upon us in a perfect flood of 
 invective . 
 
 I had never heard him talk quite like 
 
86 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 that before. It was really, and almost 
 literally, illuminating, and we reined aside 
 in a sort of reverential awe to let him pass. 
 He did so on the wings of some of the 
 most golden eloquence that it has ever 
 been my lot to hear. " Goddam ! " I heard 
 distinctly, followed by a string of words 
 which I do not know how to spell ; and 
 then some fine but strictly censorable 
 phrases, out of which I collected frag- 
 ments that made a disconnected yet in- 
 teresting whole. In this I was puzzled 
 for some moments by the many variations 
 of the word camel. *' Camel I " 1 found 
 myself saying, '* camel ! " when " Look ! " 
 said the other man suddenly, and I looked, 
 and saw striding down upon us from the 
 
 same pale sheet of sky that had held T 
 
 only a few minutes before three gaunt, 
 long-legged shadows, 
 
 " The camels ! " said the other man, and 
 I looked at him, and he looked at me, 
 and what there was in that shrouding dark- 
 ness to tell each what the other thought I 
 do not know ; but, as our frenzied horses 
 waltzed and plunged away from the acrid 
 fear behind them, we clung to our saddles 
 with both hands, and rocked and choked 
 
SIGHTS AND SMELLS Zy 
 
 with insane laughter. Later, when we 
 
 met T , leading a dead-lame pony out 
 
 of the rocks, we broke out afresh, and 
 between paroxysms, told him something of 
 our admiring respect. Indeed, a man who 
 could steer a madly racing pony through 
 pitch darkness and over and between rocks, 
 and at the same time conduct ably a 
 rhetorical discourse on the (presumed) ille- 
 gitimacy of cam'els and the moral de- 
 gener'acy of men who ride upon them, well 
 deserved some more tangible expression of 
 merit than was held in mere words. Iron 
 crosses have been given for less. 
 
 The remainder of that ride left to us 
 only recurring fits of laughter, dust, and 
 noise and darkness, and when the camels 
 came too near, which, in spite of concise 
 injunctions to them to go '* to another 
 place," they often did, spasms of wrathful 
 and sulphurous abuse. 
 
 A note in my diary says of our return 
 to Luderitzbucht : " Surprised to find myself 
 looking on the beastly place as * home ' ! " 
 
 But was there real cause for surprise? 
 
CHAPTER V 
 ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 
 
 Never, I believe, was there a campaign so 
 casually regarded by an army as was the 
 G.S.W. " affair " by the force that operated 
 from Luderitzbucht . 
 
 Even in the first flush of our landing on 
 German territory we looked upon it as merely 
 a stepping-stone to the larger issue in 
 Europe . For that we had volunteered . This 
 was merely an irksome little duty to be per- 
 formed en passant, a sort of preliminary 
 canter to the race into Berlin. We believed 
 that we were going to polish off the local 
 brand of Hun in three or, at most, four 
 months, and then, if we were not too late 
 — and at that time we half feared that we 
 might be — we would join in the scamper 
 across the Rhine, or help to capture the 
 " German High Canal Fleet " from the 
 land. 
 
 Some of the more imaginative of us, in- 
 
ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 89 
 
 deed, went to some pains to draft a sort of 
 Cook's tour of the war. From G.S.W. we 
 would go on to German East Africa. Egypt 
 and the Dardanelles would follow, and then 
 — mere geography being sacrificed on the 
 altar of our splendid optimism — we would 
 enter Galicia from the south-east — or was it 
 the north-west ?— where General Botha would 
 assume supreme command of a mixed force 
 of I.L.H. and Cossacks, whom he would 
 lead through Austria to the inevitable 
 Berlin. 
 
 For most of this the corporal who was 
 known as " O.C. Camels " was responsible. 
 Time hung heavily on his hands, and at 
 such odd moments as he could tear himself 
 away from his smellful charges he would 
 come to tell us that he had " just over- 
 heard the Colonel saying ," or " a ship 
 
 has just come in, and the chief engineer, 
 whom I knew some years ago at Dar-es- 
 Salaam " (of lavish mendacity was the 'O.C. 
 
 Camels '), " and he tells me that ." And 
 
 then would follow some wildly improbable 
 yarn, told with such earnest conviction that 
 at least one -third of the squadron existed 
 in a perpetual state of readiness to join 
 Shackleton's South Pole expedition so as to 
 
90 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 " go round the other way, and attack the 
 Germans from behind," or to crawl to 
 Windhuk on their hands and knees in the 
 guise of a flock of sand -rats, or something 
 else equally feasible. 
 
 At this time our chief grievance against 
 the " authorities " (vague term embracing 
 everything from the mismanagement of sand- 
 storms to the shortage in the rum -issue) was 
 that they never took us into their confidence 
 regarding the conduct of the campaign. We 
 were never told, for instance, when we got 
 the order to '* saddle up " whether we were 
 destined for a mere patrol, or whether the 
 long-looked for general advance had at last 
 begun, or whether it was only another 
 ** surprise alarm." One deplorable result of 
 this was that a man might just as easily 
 forget his rifle when starting on an expedi- 
 tion as not. Indeed, we had an example of 
 that on the day that we landed at Luderitz- 
 bucht. I had noticed one of our sergeants 
 looking a little more imposing than usual . A 
 sort of forced dignity sat heavily upon him, 
 and I was wondering as to the reason when 
 there came to us an oflicer, who looked him 
 up and down, as one man of fashion may 
 quiz another who is without his cane or his 
 
ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 91 
 
 gloves, or whose trousers are without their 
 
 customary crease. '* Sergeant L ," he 
 
 said, ** where is your rifle? " A flush crept 
 up the sergeant's sun -tanned neck, and his 
 ears glowed hotly : " Please, sir, I left it 
 on the ship, sir ! " 
 
 And that on the first day of all ! Small 
 wonder^ then, that we never, from first to 
 last, learned to regard war as other than a 
 somewhat unoomfortable pastime. 
 
 Thus when, on the 4th of October, the 
 smallest of the small hours saw us being 
 coerced from our blankets by the official toe 
 of the corporal of the guard, we merely 
 smothered him under a cloud of profanity, 
 and turned over and tried to get to sleep 
 again. But it was of no avail. He emerged 
 again, pawing his way through the veil of 
 obscenities, blindly, like a man who has been 
 *' gassed," and tempted us anew with the 
 news that the Germans were even then sur- 
 rounding the camp. We listened patiently 
 until he had finished, and then some one 
 told him with a wealth of lurid detail that 
 there weren't any Germans in the country. 
 ** There were five originally — and a little 
 yellow dog," the voice went on to say, " but 
 we bagged the five at Grasplatz, and if you 
 
92 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 think you're going to get me up at this time 
 o' night to chase after a Goddam poodle, 
 you're mistaken I " 
 
 I do not know who invented the " little 
 yellow dog." He was always with us. Like 
 the " Brer Rabbit " of the American negroes, 
 he is a fable — the fable of " D " Squadron 
 I.L.H. 
 
 But we knew that it was of no use, and 
 within ten minutes we were flinging saddles 
 on our astonished horses. I do not think 
 that we altogether believed the story about 
 the Germans ; but while there is any sort 
 of hope there is no " grousing," and it was 
 a moderately contented body of men that 
 rode out into the first paleness of the coming 
 day. 
 
 A brief half -hour later we were completely 
 undeceived. Our troop leader halted us at 
 the beginning of the gorge through which 
 runs the railway line to Kolmanskuppe, and 
 told us with a bluntness of speech and a 
 total lack of consideration for our feelings 
 which showed that he, too, regretted his 
 blankets, that we were to " guard the kopjes 
 along the railway line." "What for?" I 
 wondered, as I gazed up at the crags that 
 cut blackly into the growing light behind 
 
ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 93 
 
 them. As far as I could see, they looked 
 eminently capable of guarding themselves. 
 '* At about nine o'clock," the O.C. went on 
 to say. — it was then about three o'clock, by 
 the way, and most infernally cold — '* a, water- 
 trolley will pass on its Way to Kolmanskuppe . 
 At about five this evening, it will return. 
 Until then no man is to leave his post, unless 
 dam -well ordered to ! " 
 
 For this, then, we had forsaken our 
 blankets in the middle of the night ; for 
 this we had burdened ourselves with much 
 extra ammunition and tins of bully-beef and 
 jam. '' Told you there wasn't a bloomin' 
 
 German in the country ! " said the voice 
 
 that I had heard earlier ; but this was when 
 my section was dragging its horses up the 
 scarred, rock-strewn flank of the hill that 
 we were to guard, and the O.C. was away 
 out of earshot, posting other sections on 
 other hills. 
 
 There is little to be said of that first 
 day spent on the hills. Recollection blends 
 it confusedly with the memories of many 
 other day^ spent in a like manner. For 
 the first hour or so, I remember, when the 
 hills swam in the pure light, when the air 
 was good to breathe and tobacco was a 
 
94 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 God's gift, our watch was pleasant enough ; 
 later, when the shade went and the flies 
 came, and the rocks whereon we lay or 
 sat grew so uncomfortably, hot that it was 
 impossible to remain for long in any one 
 position, and the writer even went to the 
 length of pillowing his head on a nosebag 
 and trying to sleep in the shadow of his 
 horse, until the poor, fly-pestered beast tried 
 to dance on him, and he got frightened 
 and ran away ; when the landscape rose on 
 its hind -legs and waltzed in the shimmering 
 heat, and our bully-beef resolved itself into 
 a horrid mess of sinew and mystery floating 
 in yellow grease — then the four of us, who 
 liked each other well enough in ordinary 
 circumstances, forbore all conversation, be- 
 cause it was too hot to swear, and sat and 
 shied chips of granite at venturesome black 
 lizards until the shadows came again, and 
 brought with them a hellish discord of 
 shouting and cracking of whips, which was 
 the water -trolleys, and our signal to go 
 home . 
 
 It was upon our return to camp on this 
 day that we were told that the R.L.I, 
 pickets had shot two Germans who had 
 attempted to sneak into Luderitzbucht on 
 
ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 95 
 
 the previous night, but, generally speaking, 
 the diary which I kept at this time shows 
 in its almost discourteous brevity some- 
 thing of the boredom of manner with 
 which we regarded the campaign in 
 general . 
 
 "October 14-15-16," an entry reads. 
 " Camp. Sand and flies in equal parts ! " 
 An entire page of it is given up to a 
 description of a snake and lizard fight which 
 was witnessed on one of our kopje -guarding 
 expeditions, and October 1 1 is marked down 
 as having been chiefly remarkable for a 
 " stand to arms " that was suffered in the 
 middle of the night because an enthusiastic 
 sentry of the Pretoria Regiment mistook 
 the rising moon for an enemy bonfire 
 or something of the sort, and tried to 
 shoot it. 
 
 During the latter half of October it be- 
 came general knowledge that information 
 was leaking out to the enemy. Certain 
 houses, wherein dwelt Germans " on good 
 behaviour," I know, were being watched. 
 One of these " ticket -of -leave " Huns, I 
 remember, had been retained by the authori- 
 ties as a sort of sanitary inspector. He 
 was a weird - looking little person with 
 
96 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 spectacles, and he used to ride about the 
 town on a horse several sizes too large for 
 him. One day^ he was gone, and his 
 place was filled by a rumour that told how 
 he had been sent to Cape Town to be 
 executed as a spy. Whether this was true 
 or not I am in no wise prepared to say, 
 but anyway the mere story gave our sentries 
 such a zest for their work that the R.L.I, 
 succeeded on the same night in seriously 
 wounding one of their own officers who was 
 " visiting rounds." 
 
 At evening stables on October 17th — a 
 day which only narrowly escaped being 
 bracketed with the " sand and flies " entry 
 of the previous three — we were told to draw 
 our next day's rations in advance, and to 
 see that our water-bottles were filled. Not 
 a word was said to us of any kind of 
 movement toward. " Ours not to reason 
 why," nor even to suspect, and that, I 
 suppose, was why an hour after dark found 
 us with our horses saddled, waiting for 
 the " surprise." We took leave to presume, 
 with that fluent pessimism which marks 
 the really good soldier^ that it was going 
 to be another attack on " poor old Fort 
 Grasplatz." (Up to then we had captured 
 
ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 97 
 
 that historic place on no fewer than four 
 separate occasions, and we were getting 
 rather tired of it.) But when we were 
 formally paraded, and told that the Natal 
 Carbineers were to accompaJi,y us, or rather, 
 seeing that they were the senior regiment, 
 that we were to accompany them, we were 
 quietly uplifted among ourselves, and looked 
 forward to a new venture. 
 
 Nor were we altogether disappointed. 
 We were told that our objective was a 
 night march on a place called Elizabeth- 
 bucht, where was a military post which we 
 were to attack at dawn. From there we 
 were to return in extended formation — 
 with the four squadrons of Carbineers we 
 would be able to cover a sweep of from 
 ten to twelve miles of ground — to thoroughly 
 " drive " the country back in the direction 
 of Luderitzbucht, and to snap up any 
 German patrols that might be caught in 
 our net . To make things more certain 
 the Transvaal Scottish were going to move 
 out during the night to a distance of some 
 three or four miles, there to await such 
 stray enemy patrols as might be driven on 
 to them. 
 
 It all sounded beautifully simple, and 
 
 7 
 
98 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 although things did not turn out quite 
 as we hoped, without that alluring pro- 
 gramme before us we could not, I am sure, 
 have sustained so cheerfully the night's 
 work that was to be ours. It was bitterlyi 
 cold. A knife -edged wind came and played 
 with us among the rocks wherein we rode, 
 and some time later, when we had forsaken 
 the hills for the easier going of the sea 
 beach (Elizabethbucht, which is some fifteen 
 miles distant from Luderitzbucht, is on the 
 coast), an ice-cold sea mist settled about 
 us and soaked us to the skin. For some 
 five miles we held to the coast, the call of 
 sea birds in our ears and the taste of salt 
 on our lips. Hills grew up again around 
 us, and rocks took the place of sand. 
 All sound else became drowned in the steady 
 snarling of an ebb tide that sucked over 
 some unseen bar, save once, when there 
 came to us from somewhere out of the 
 white -streaked waters a sudden noise of 
 jabbering, like old men in heated argument, 
 and Which I now believe was a colony of 
 black seals, but which then, in the darkness 
 and the uncertainty of the night and our 
 mission, sounded mightily uncanny. 
 
 At what hour we halted and " ringed " 
 
ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 99 
 
 our horses, I cannot say. The sound of 
 the sea was gone, I know, and with it the 
 soaking mist. But of that bivouac there 
 are two outstanding memories, each as 
 unforgettable in its way. as the other. One 
 was the spectacle, which struck us as being 
 funny, of Carbineer officers walking about 
 with stable lanterns in their hands looking 
 for comfortable places to sleep in, and the 
 other was of a voice that spoke to me out 
 of the darkness, bidding me to sleep with 
 him because he was cold, and, when II 
 complied with the request, of a flask of 
 brandy that was thrust into my hands, 
 with a whispered injunction not to thank 
 him ** quite so loudly, because, you see, 
 old chap, ours is a very thirsty squadron, 
 and this flask is so little, so very little ! " 
 
 Dear old M ! should you chance to 
 
 read these lines, remember that if my 
 thanks on tliat night were not over- 
 effusive, and if, as you said, I did drink 
 rather more than my fair share of the 
 brandy, at least my gratitude is of a 
 lasting nature. 
 
 We slept, or rather pretended to sleep, 
 under the lee of a big rock, and there 
 grew up during the night, and stuck into 
 
loo WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 my ribs, a lesser rock which I tried to 
 uproot, but upon which I broke all my 
 finger-nails instead, and my stable com- 
 panion accused me of ingratitude and of 
 rowelling him with my spurs. Dawn, 
 however, came at last, and the order to 
 mount : a grey dawn that showed nothing 
 of the coming of the sun ; just a spirit- 
 less half-light wherein rocks and sand and 
 men took on a unifortn dull hue. In all 
 that landscape, we found to our surprise, 
 we were alone save for a squadron of car- 
 bineers . that was making off at a sharp 
 trot at a wide angle to our own course. 
 My section was sent ahead to a distance of 
 some four or five hundred yards ; flanking 
 sections cut themselves away from the 
 squadron and galloped out until they were 
 abreast with u,s and at some hundred yards 
 range, and we started. For hours, it 
 seemed, we rode, before the sun's rim 
 stepped out upon thje curtain of far hills, 
 and yellow, watery light quickened our 
 shivering horses. Sand and rocks and 
 scrub — we were to meet with real vegeta- 
 tion, for the first time, later on — scrub and 
 sand and rocks — a wilderness that howled 
 aloud. 
 
ALARUMS AND EXCURSION'S ioi* 
 
 For slow miles the changeless horizon 
 seemed to mock our progress. Ridge after 
 ridge of rising ground promised new things 
 and gave us the same old monotony — 
 rocks and scrub and sand. 
 
 It must have been nearly eight o'clock 
 — we had, anyway, for some time been dis- 
 cussing the breakfast that we were not going 
 to get — when a sudden dip in the ground 
 brought to our view a collection of tin 
 shanties and a miscellany of diamond - 
 working plant. The whole face of the earth 
 was heaped up in mounds of gravel and 
 sand, and between the mounds were hand- 
 rotators and barrels and quaint - looking 
 cylindrical sieves. The squadron halted 
 while we went forward to investigate. 
 Crowds of pigeons flew about us as I dis- 
 mounted at the first open door, and went 
 inside to investigate. A half-eaten meal, 
 a glass with the dregs of beer in it, and a 
 bed unslept in. That was all. The second 
 hut told the same story of a hurried de- 
 parture, and the third, and the next. "No 
 Germans for us to-day, my boy ! " said the 
 man who had held my horse. " Never mind 
 the Germans," said another ; " I've found 
 a tin of pine-apple ! " 
 
I02 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 Half an hour or so later the hoofs of 
 our horses rang sharply on the metals of 
 a narrow-gauge railway line half-buried in 
 the sand, and soon afterwards an official - 
 looking tin roof grew out of the shoulder 
 of a humpbacked sand-dune. 
 
 The '* military post " which we were to 
 atta(^k ! We reined in and looked around. 
 The squadron seemed to be a long way 
 behind, and we were only four ; but 
 curiosity is a more impelling factor than 
 mere courage, and within a couple of 
 minutes we were dismounted before a 
 notice-board which told us in official black 
 letters that this was the Elizabethbucht 
 police-station ! Some few fowls wandered 
 in and out of the open door, and a brace 
 of pigeons were flirting on the rim of a 
 chimney. Military post ! Pshaw ! this was 
 worse than Grasplatz ! There was a thud- 
 ding of hoofs behind us, and we looked 
 round to discover the Colonel's galloper. 
 '* * The old man,' " he began, his eyes not 
 on me, but on the doorway of the station — 
 " * the old man ' says ye've got to go and 
 find the Carbineers ! " " Where are they? 
 Are they lost?" I asked, faintly sarcastic. 
 *' I don't know — an' * the old man ' don't 
 
ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 103 
 
 know — if they're lost, or if we're lost, but 
 ye've got to go and find 'em." " But where 
 are they? " I looked away to the barren 
 horizon. " Don't know, I'm sure," he an- 
 swered over his shoulder — he had dis- 
 mounted and was stooping to the low porch 
 of the building — " but * the old man ' says 
 ye're to gallop like th' divil ! " 
 
 I got into my saddle thoughtfully. Now, 
 where on earth, in a wilderness of sand- 
 dunes and rocks, might one reasonably 
 expect to find Carbineers growing? They 
 were not behind us, certainly, or we should 
 have seen them. That left three cardinal 
 points of the compass for me to choose 
 from. To the left, and in front, unbroken 
 sand-dunes met the sky in an ugly straight 
 line. To the right, a glimpse of blue sea 
 showed over the crest of some sugar-loaf 
 sand-hills. That, at least, looked friendly, 
 and I started off at a canter through the 
 deep sand. 
 
 The Carbineers, I knew, might just as 
 likely as not be in either of the other two 
 directions that I had discarded, and I 
 might be riding straight into the Germans 
 that we had come all this way to meet. 
 It was on the heels of this thought that 
 
104 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 I realized, with something of a shock, that I 
 did not particularly want to meet them — 
 just then. A wide valley opened up before 
 me, and I held straight down its centre in 
 some vague hope, I believe, that I might 
 be out of range of the hills on each side. 
 It was not only the thought of the Germans 
 that was bothering me. I might — the day 
 of miracles not yet being past — I might 
 even meet the Carbineers and they might 
 mistake me for a German, and some of 
 them, I now remembered having heard, were 
 rattling good shots. 
 
 Even ordinary peaceable citizens in or- 
 dinary peaceable times have been known to 
 remark on the extraordinary resemblances 
 that one sometimes sees in rocks to men 
 and dogs, and even to cattle. On this occa- 
 sion I saw no dogs or cattle, but I saw 
 dozens of men, all unmistakably Germans, 
 and all in lethal attitudes. Of course they 
 were only rocks, and I kept persuading 
 myself of the fact, but once, I remember, 
 when a prone grey figure that I had been 
 watching for some half -minute or so seemed 
 ever so slightly to change its position, and 
 the next instant I heard a twanging rush 
 through the air above my head, I ducked 
 
ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 105 
 
 on to my horse's neck and wondered for 
 a moment where I was hit. On the next 
 instant I looked back to find that a line 
 of telegraph-poles had crossed my; path and 
 it was the wind in the low -hung wires that 
 I had heard. 
 
 The valley down which I rode opened 
 out into a waste of sand, and I became 
 aware of a string of horsemen moving 
 diagonally across my front. I cantered on 
 for a few hundred yards, and watched 
 them while they halted and faced round in 
 my direction. It was impossible at that 
 distance— fifteen hundred yards at the very 
 least — to tell whether they were Carbineers 
 or not, and as I moved forward I held out 
 my hat in my right hand. This was the 
 signal by which we were to distinguish 
 friends from foes, and I waited anxiously 
 for its acknowledgment and return. One 
 —two— three hundred yards slipped past, and 
 still they made no sign. Four hundred ! 
 This was getting serious, and I reined in 
 to a walk. Five hundred ! Ah ! there it 
 was ! A man had ridden clear of the others, 
 and— blessed sight !— he was giving the " All 
 right " signal. 
 
 A few minutes later I was explaining 
 
io6 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 myself to an officer. " Colonel D ^n's 
 
 compliments, sir ! "—and here, since the 
 galloper who had sent me on that wild 
 ride had not told me what " the old man " 
 wanted with the Carbineers, I plunged 
 recklessly—*' and will you be so good as 
 to link up with him, and— and commence 
 the drive." 
 
 The end of my speech sounded lame in 
 my own ears, but it seemed to be what the 
 Carbineer officer wanted. " Right ! " he 
 said, " and where precisely, in all this large 
 
 country, might Colonel D n be found?" 
 
 I indicated, vaguely, the desert whence I 
 had come ; a whistle blew shrilly, and the 
 wide-strung line of horsemen wheeled half- 
 right to the signal that followed, and we 
 moved on again. Far below us, and to our 
 left, the still waters of Elizabeth's Bay— as 
 the new maps know it— winked in the sun- 
 light, and a cluster of some half-dozen tin 
 sheds stood out in clear relief against the 
 white sand of its beach. 
 
 Nearer still, and running parallel with 
 our course, was the narrow-gauge railway 
 that we had met earlier in the morning. 
 A mule -drawn trolley, guarded by some 
 half-dozen horsemen, provided the only life 
 
ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 107 
 
 in the picture. ''What's that?" I asked 
 of a trooper who was riding next to me. 
 " Prisoners ! " he replied, and, seeing my 
 surprise, added : " Non-combatants, of 
 course; diamond-diggers, or something. 
 One of 'em's a woman "—he paused and 
 chuckled. " She came out o' one o' the huts 
 with a flutter like a lot o' hens when we 
 surrounded 'em this morning, an'— well, it 
 was very early, y' know, an' old Stick-in-the- 
 mud "—he indicated an officer who was 
 riding slightly in advance of us—" he made 
 us right-about while she collected herself." 
 He paused again, and looked ruminatingly 
 at the officer -man. " I never seen 'im blush 
 before ! " he concluded. 
 
 A group of specks appeared on a far 
 ridge. "Are those your fellows?" "Stick- 
 in-the-mud " had called out to me over his 
 shoulder. " Yes, sir," I answered unhesi- 
 tatingly, although, as far as I could tell at 
 that distance, they were just as likely to 
 be Germans. I was right, however, and 
 within a quarter of an hour I was back in 
 my own section. 
 
 From this time onward we did not seri- 
 ously entertain any hope of meeting the 
 enemy. Too obviously they had received 
 
io8 WITH BOTHA^S ARMY 
 
 wind of our coming, and as the affair 
 seemed destined to resolve itself into a 
 picnic— well, we would treat it as a picnic ! 
 Thereafter, although we kept to our extended 
 formation when the nature of the country 
 allowed us to do so, save once, when the 
 nearness of the sea tempted us from all 
 semblance of military virtue, and we rode 
 our horses into the breakers, we treated 
 the whole affair as schoolboys treat a half- 
 holiday. 
 
 For an hour or more we rode in the 
 shadow of great hills, or picked a careful 
 way down deep gorges, where bushes- 
 actual bushes, with green leaves on them— 
 brushed our horses' bellies, and clouds of 
 yellow and white butterflies danced mazily 
 away from the disturbance. 
 
 Hares were numerous here, and once a 
 species of buck— a rhe-bok, I think it was 
 —jinked away among the strewn boulders, 
 and once, again, I saw a man dismount to 
 put his heel on the ugly, squat head of a 
 puff-adder. 
 
 Somewhere about midday, when, by dint 
 of sheer ingenuity, we had managed to 
 interpose a small ridge of hills between 
 ourselves and the rest of the squadron, my 
 
ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS 109 
 
 section spread themselves sumptuously over 
 a repast of tinned pineapple and cold tea 
 and bully -beef that was sufficiently melted to 
 be impossible as bully -beef, but just toler- 
 able, when spread on dry ship's biscuit, as 
 a sort of butter. 
 
 When eventually we rejoined the squad- 
 ron, we found that our subterfuge had 
 really been unnecessary, as they, too, had 
 lunched ; but then, I do not suppose that 
 we should have enjoyed our meal one half 
 as much if we had eaten it honestly. 
 
 During the afternoon the hills disappeared 
 and a field of sand-dunes spread itself 
 across the face of the country and drove 
 us to the easier going of the sea -beach. 
 The Carbineers had gone from us— we 
 vaguely understood that we were still in 
 touch with them, but where or how we 
 did not greatly care— and we idled along 
 in perfect contentment of mind. Our path 
 was hemmed with beauty on that afternoon. 
 Pink-hued flamingoes gemmed the sand- 
 banks ; from the rocky islets whereon they 
 drowsed black seals lifted inquisitive snouts 
 to our passing, and now and again our horses 
 would snort uneasily at the bleached skeleton 
 of some immense whale. 
 
no WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 Somehow, in G.S.W., landscape follows 
 landscape with the abruptness of stage 
 scenery, and when, suddenly, the coast- 
 line curved away from us, a hundred yards 
 or so of heavy progress through a tongue 
 of the dune-field, brought us to a wilder- 
 ness of small granite hills. As a background 
 to these again were the larger hills, behind 
 which, we knew, was Luderitzbucht. 
 
 A nearer sky-line became peopled with 
 specks. One of them was waving a flag, 
 but no one of my section understood the 
 morse code, and we lost the message. 
 The specks were the signalling section of 
 the Transvaal Scottish, and a quarter of an 
 hour later our horses were snorting and 
 shying at kilted apparitions that arose upon 
 all sides of us from the bare sand. 
 
 These, too, were the Transvaal Scottish, 
 and I think that we gained a new respect 
 for them on the spot. That a half -company 
 of men— and I counted at least fifty of them 
 —could lie in the path of a body of mounted 
 troops and remain absolutely undetected 
 until the horses were almost literally on top 
 of them, was a lesson in the practical value 
 of taking cover that is not easy to forget. 
 
 ** How long have you been lying there?" 
 
ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS iii 
 
 I asked of one. " Since about three o'clock 
 this morning," he replied. I looked at the 
 glowing sunset behind us, and proffered him 
 my tobacco pouch— the only sign of respect 
 within my power at that moment. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 A NIGHT RIDE, AND AFTER 
 
 A MILE-LONG tunnel of dust roofed with 
 dim starlight. 
 
 That is really all the story of a night ride 
 through the desert lands of German South- 
 West Africa. 
 
 There are other things of course : hills 
 that rim the vague earth round, showing 
 like so many dark gaps cut out of the 
 night ; the sullen murmur of the sands ; the 
 brief outcry of bare rock overpassed ; the 
 wheezing of sand -choked horses ; but all, 
 muffled sight and muffled sound alike, are 
 just vague impressions sensed rather than 
 seen and heard. 
 
 Be your company one thousand men or 
 but one score, you are aware only of those 
 just ahead of you and of some few that 
 follow after. Beyond the range of a mur- 
 mured curse— and night service in an enemy 
 country does not permit of emphatic bias- 
 
A NIGHT RIDE, AND AFTER 113 
 
 phemy— is the barrier of dust and night. 
 Only when the way lies over hills, and 
 you may look down and see the dark snake 
 of the column writhe out upon the pale 
 sands below, or watch the constant firefly 
 flicker that tells of stress of steel-shod hoof 
 and naked granite, may you gain the 
 peculiar courage of numbers. When you 
 are in the desert proper, and the white sand 
 lifts its curtain about you, you can be, almost 
 dreadfully, alone. 
 
 There are incidents, too. The dismounted 
 group that you pass, bending to the prone 
 figure whose horse, perhaps, has fallen with 
 him ; the halt while some unsuspected scout 
 rides in to report what you, gentlemen of 
 the rank and file, will never learn ; the low- 
 voiced " Non-commissioned officers ! " and 
 the group which forms to listen to orders 
 that you strain your ears to catch ; the order 
 to mount, and the undertone of laughter at 
 the plight of some unfortunate whose horse 
 "objects." Forgotten as soon as passed, 
 it will be days before memory can shuffle 
 these happenings into any sort of order, 
 and weeks, sometimes, before they can be 
 told. 
 
 On Octo-ber 22nd was just such an ex- 
 S 
 
114 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 perience. We were paraded at dusk, and 
 after the usual harangue on the uncomfort- 
 able punishment which would be ours if 
 we talked above a whisper, or so far forgot 
 ourselves as to strike a match, we rode 
 down to the Natal Carbineers' lines, and 
 waited : waited while the men from Natal 
 asserted their regimental seniority and rode 
 away ahead of us ; waited while some 
 ambitious water-carts that had got mixed 
 up with the advance were brought back 
 again ; waited while a troop of the Rand 
 Intelligence Corps— the " Rest In Com- 
 forts " of our own strictly unofficial Army 
 List— were tacked on to the tail of the 
 column ; waited while some wagons that 
 had got lost were found ; and finally, when 
 patience had worn very thin indeed, were 
 permitted to move off into the dust -choked 
 darkness of another unknown quest. 
 
 When hope runs high, things little in 
 themselves assume enormous proportions, 
 and the wagons and water-carts were to us 
 on this occasion what a straw is said to be 
 to a drowning man. And we were drown- 
 ing, drowning in a sea of despondency. 
 A month of unremitting sandstorm, relieved, 
 if that be the expression, by three or four 
 
A NIGHT RIDE, AND AFTER 115 
 
 hopelessly blank expeditions, had reduced 
 us to the condition, almost, of believing that 
 there really were no Germans in the country. 
 And now we were being sent out with water- 
 carts and wagons. We had never had them 
 before ; therefore— our logic will not, per- 
 haps be altogether clear to any one who has 
 not experienced similar hopes and fears— 
 therefore there must be Germans at the end 
 of our journey. 
 
 Where, before, we had ridden all through 
 the night, only, apparently, for the pleasure 
 of riding back again on the following day, 
 midnight, on this occasion, found us at 
 Kolmanskuppe being guided by drowsy in- 
 fantry pickets to horse -lines already pre- 
 pared for us. This in itself was surprising, 
 but the horse -lines were infinitely more so. 
 ** 'Orse lines? — bloomln' clothes-lines ! " I 
 heard a scornful voice say. Poles, festooned 
 with slackly hung wires — and these at an 
 average height of about six feet—did, cer- 
 tainly, give to the place the respectable air 
 of a laundry aniiexe, but they were better 
 than nothing, anyway. We hung up our 
 horses as best we could, and went to sleep 
 in our spurs. 
 
 There is an art in sleeping in the sands. 
 
ii6 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 We had long since discovered, for instance, 
 that however cold the night, the sand held 
 always something of the sun's warmth, and 
 we used to scoop out hollows to the depth 
 of six inches or so to sleep in. Usually, 
 after half an hour or less, warmth and 
 grace alike would depart from us, and we 
 would be driven to further finger-stubbing 
 searches after warm beds. A wakeful night, 
 indeed, would often present a weird spec- 
 tacle. Dark forms, heralding their uprising 
 by soft curses, would emerge at intervals 
 from the silent sands around, crawl on hands 
 and knees for some few yards, burrow 
 vigorously for a while, and then drop with 
 a grunt into temporary silence. 
 
 I remember one occasion, when I slept 
 with three or four others in a pit of our 
 own digging, and was afterwards profoundly 
 grateful to the bitter cold which had driven 
 us to the expedient. During the night I 
 awoke once or twice to a half -consciousness 
 of a growing wind, and of some weight of 
 sand upon rrfy blankets that was not there 
 when I turned in. " There'll be a proper 
 sandstorm to-morrow," a sleepy voice had 
 said, and I remembered afterwards how 
 casual had been my agreement. 
 
A NIGHT RIDE, AND AFTER 117 
 
 Dawn, on that morning, came in with a 
 shout. There was a clanging of iron, a 
 sound of devils' anvil play, and, with the 
 realization, the swift onrush of some great 
 thing that loomed upon us out of the sand- 
 haze. I was sitting up trying to clear my 
 eyes of caked sand, but instinct, or some- 
 thing quicker than myself, flung me down, 
 and the same instant was filled with huge 
 sound, and a hint, just a hint — nothing more 
 —of tremendous pressure. When it had 
 passed I sat up again to stare at the retreat- 
 ing form of a cylindrical water-tank which 
 had bowled over us where we lay. 
 
 I have no idea of the weight of that tank. 
 It measured, I should say, not less than 
 twelve feet by five, and the wind which was 
 chasing it across the territory was also 
 whirling sand -drift before it at an easy 
 sixty miles an hour. We were considerably 
 impressed, and went to some pains after- 
 wards to measure the inches of our escape. 
 Our " surface -lines," we gathered, must, on 
 the average, have been just about flush with 
 the desert's face. I say "on the average," 
 because one man there was of our party 
 who spent a not inconsiderable portion of 
 the ensuing week in nursing a knee that 
 
ii8 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 had omitted to take cover with the rest 
 of him. 
 
 The first half -hour or so of that morning 
 presented an amazing spectacle. For the 
 greater part of the time was nothing but 
 sand and the savage wind, but at intervals 
 the booming sound that had first awakened 
 us would herald the passing of other water- 
 tanks. Where they came from I know not, 
 nor can I hazard any guess as to where 
 they were going. They simply loomed out 
 of the sandstorm to come, on the one hand, 
 and were whirled into the yellow fog of 
 sandstorm past, on the other. Later, when 
 we had removed ourselves and such of our 
 belongings as we could find to the com- 
 parative shelter of a line of railway trucks, 
 we saw one of these cylinders trundling 
 merrily along at an undreamed of pace. 
 *' Wonder how it's going to take the railway 
 line," some one asked, and we watched 
 breathlessly. At some hundred yards or so 
 short of the line a drift of sand turned it 
 in a sudden, savage curve in our direction, 
 and for fifty yards or so it skated on one 
 screaming rim ; but the wind swung it plumb 
 again, and its shrill clamour became a deep 
 grumble. Crash! The three-foot bank on 
 
A NIGHT RIDE, AND AFTER 119 
 
 which the metals gleamed seemed to jump 
 out to kick the tank high into the air. 
 For an appreciable instant it floated, and 
 then it boomed to earth again, and a fresh 
 wave of sandstorm rose to its impact, and 
 it was gone from us. 
 
 Within ten seconds we were making for 
 the spot where it had landed. Arrived 
 there, we looked at each other in silence, 
 and then proceeded solemnly to pace off 
 the distance from the point where it had 
 struck the bank. When we had done so, 
 we remembered the earlier visitor who had 
 stepped over us in the dawn, and we looked 
 at each other again. In that appreciable 
 instant during which the tank, looking like 
 some snub-nosed Zeppelin, had seemed to 
 float in the air, it had covered twenty- 
 seven generous yards. 
 
 This has been a long digression, and is 
 only pardonable as being to some extent 
 expressive of the chaos of anecdote which 
 dwells in the mind of the average sand- 
 buffeted sojourner in the desert. Let him 
 loose on one story concerning sandstorms, 
 and he will strip his memory of all the 
 other sandstorms that he has ever seen or 
 heard of to make his one story presentable. 
 
I20 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 Even of myself I can say that I find it 
 safe to write of things that happened in 
 that campaign only when I have my diary 
 propped up before me. 
 
 Dawn, then, on that October 23rd to 
 which this chronicle must confine itself, 
 found us half blinded by just such a sand- 
 storm as that which I have described. There 
 was no spectacular display of water-tanks, 
 but the sand-blast was so pitiless that I do 
 not think we should have minded much if 
 the whole of the expeditionary force's roll- 
 ing-stock had rolled down upon us. We 
 built shelters — that is to say we erected 
 sheets of corrugated iron, borrowed hastily 
 from the buildings on the heights above us, 
 and called them shelters. We built them 
 with their backs to the searching wind, 
 roofed them, and weighted the roofs down 
 with large stones, but some law of vacuum 
 that we never quite got the hang of made 
 whirlwinds in our doorways and drove us 
 finally to the length of swaddling our faces 
 in cloth. The ostrich of the fable, who 
 buried his head in the sand, was not such 
 a fool as our wise men have tried to paint 
 him. 
 
 Our horses, poor beasts, turned their backs 
 
A NIGHT RIDE, AND AFTER 121 
 
 to the searing blast, and were grateful to 
 the nosebags which we hung upon them, 
 less, I think, for the sake of the grain than 
 for the protection that they afforded to 
 tortured nostrils. 
 
 At about five o'clock in the afternoon 
 things began to happen. The sandstorm, 
 after a final furious effort or two, died 
 away as suddenly as it had come up in 
 the dawn ; coffee, made in some infantry 
 mess in one of the houses, was brought 
 down to us in great cauldrons ; troop 
 sergeants arose and told us to feed " and 
 
 be quick about it ! " and when we had 
 
 stuffed ourselves with army-biscuits soaked 
 in black coffee, a casual -looking train 
 strolled round a bend in the line, and 
 gave us a glimpse of General McKenzie and, 
 along its dingy length, of a fresco of Staff 
 officers and hospital nurses. 
 
 Handkerchiefs were fluttering to us, and 
 we suddenly became conscious of the fact 
 that our sand-encrusted state held something 
 of the picturesque. Non-commissioned 
 officers who up till then had been content 
 to stare moodily at the sand suddenly became 
 imbued with huge energy, and stood in 
 heroic postures and shouted meaningless 
 
122 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 orders at troopers who were too busy. 
 ** doing their bit " to take any sort of 
 notice, until a real order came from 
 somewhere, and we fell in to listen to 
 instructions . 
 
 " Water-bottles to be filled. Rations for 
 horse and man for one day to be drawn. 
 Rifles to be inspected. Greatcoats and 
 blankets to be rolled up— and to be left 
 behind." 
 
 " to be left behind! " H'm ! it was 
 
 going to be cold work then. But what 
 did the cold matter? What did anything 
 matter? We were not going to travel 
 light for nothing. There was fun ahead. 
 Joy ! 
 
 We listened in a deep content, and when 
 the order came for us to fall away, we did 
 not wait for any more, but flung upon 
 the quartermaster and demanded things 
 necessary for the welfare of man and 
 beast. We heaped our overcoats and 
 blankets upon him, and contumely when 
 he told us that the rum ration had not 
 arrived . 
 
 Not, of course, that we really minded. 
 The rum was of a particularly vile order, 
 but it seemed to represent something that 
 
A NIGHT RIDE, AND AFTER 123 
 
 we had left behind us when we *' joined the 
 Army," and we used to insist upon the issue, 
 and when we had got it, we used to screw 
 up our eyes and drink ostentatious silent 
 toasts . 
 
 " Saddle up ! " 
 
 The welcome command cut short our 
 pretence at grumbling, and we seized saddles 
 and bridles and rushed the horse lines. A 
 quarter of an hour later we were paraded 
 and inspected by the General. The scene, 
 I think, may not have been altogether 
 unimpressive. The dark mass of Car- 
 bineers were paraded in front of us, and 
 the ridge above was black with watching 
 infantry . 
 
 The dregs of a sullen, purple sunset 
 brooded over the far hills, and the air, 
 warm and pulseless, was oppressive even 
 after the sandstorm. In any other country 
 one would have said that " it looked like 
 rain," but in that desert the thought even 
 was not admissible. The slow light faded, 
 and the spectators on the ridge became a 
 ragged black fringe. 
 
 A knot of these, midway between our- 
 selves and the Carbineers, raised a faint 
 cheer. What was happening? Ah! There 
 
124 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 was a stir and a rustle among the troops 
 ahead of us, and we could see the dark 
 column writhing out as squadron after 
 squadron linked up and thrust forward. 
 Our turn came, and with it the familiar 
 smell of kicked-up dust. 
 
 The same order as before : Natal Car- 
 bineers — four squadrons of them — in front ; 
 ourselves next ; then the Intelligence (why 
 behind? I wondered); and then the dust 
 walls closed upon us, and we — my: section, 
 that is, with those immediately before and 
 behind us — were alone. 
 
 For some miles we kept to the railway 
 line. Stettin, marked large on the map, 
 but consisting in reality of a tin shed and 
 a signboard, and nothing more — the place 
 memorable where we had first run into the 
 Germans — was passed while there was still 
 sufficient light to see things. There was the 
 spurred heel of rock whence the enemy had 
 ambushed our advance, and there were still 
 the dead horses — dark blots on the grey 
 sand. 
 
 Nothing much in themselves, but of deep 
 interest to men who had existed for nearly 
 a month on the bare memory of that first 
 brisk little skirmish among the desolate 
 
A NIGHT RIDE, AND AFTER 125 
 
 sand-dunes. A mile or so farther on we 
 passed Fort Grasplatz, looking now piti- 
 fully abandoned with its splintered door 
 still swinging on twisted hinges, and the 
 untidy litter before the store which we had 
 rifled for food and drink. It had looked 
 vastly different on that first morning 
 when it had risen out of the sunrise 
 to spit bullets at the ridge whereon we 
 had lain . 
 
 Thus far, Grasplatz had represented the 
 farthest point of our wanderings. We had 
 paid several official and entirely uneventful 
 visits to the place, and its attractions had 
 long since palled. From now onwards was 
 brand-new country, and the thought gave 
 to the bare -shouldered hills before us some- 
 thing of a sinister lure. 
 
 It was somewhere among these black 
 granite ridges, miles after we had forsaken 
 the railway, that the darkness ahead was 
 split by a sudden flash of white light, and 
 before my horse had ceased to expostulate — 
 on his hind legs — the deep -throated growl 
 of thunder rose above the sound of our 
 progress . 
 
 From then onwards, throughout the night, 
 our way was lit by the streaked flame of 
 
126 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 a storm that seemed never to get any nearer . 
 Unsuspected hills stood up in instant 
 silhouette against the glare, and were gone, 
 and came again, and went. There was not 
 a breath of wind, and the heavy pall of dust 
 choked us as we rode forward. Dead-white 
 walls, whereon each night -stabbing flash 
 painted spots and Catherine -wheels of 
 shifting colour, shut us in, and the dull 
 muttering of the night's wrath swallowed all 
 sound else. The slow miles dropped behind, 
 white sand gave place to red, and then the 
 real darkness came, and with it the smell 
 of rain. The horses smelt it, and one could 
 feel the new life in them as they lifted 
 their heads and opened wide nostrils to 
 its coolth. 
 
 But the rain never came. Only the light- 
 ning woke the white sparkle of steel in the 
 curtain of fine red dust that rose in swathes 
 about us, and the mocking storm-god 
 growled in his throat at our longing. Some- 
 where towards the dawn we ofl^-saddled, and 
 laid ourselves down for such sleep as we 
 could find. 
 
 On our left hand, and seen only when the 
 vagrant lightning threw its bulk into dark 
 relief against the clouds, towered a red- 
 
A NIGHT RIDE, AND AFTER 127 
 
 walled mountain of sand. On the other side 
 of it, somewhere, we understood, was a 
 place marked in capital letters on the map 
 as " Rotkuppes." How far, or how near, 
 we neither knew nor cared. We were too 
 tired to strip ourselves of our bandoliers 
 even, and we lay as we had ridden, hung 
 about with all the uncomfortable accoutre- 
 ment of the M.I., but it was a happy, thought,, 
 all the same, to know that Rotkuppes was 
 on the farther side of that hill. Capital 
 letters must surely spell Germans, and we 
 were really very, very keen. 
 
 A warm wind searched us out at dawn, 
 and we awoke and saddled up under a sky 
 of deep-bellied clouds that looked as if they 
 needed only a push to make them rain. 
 We wanted that rain almost as badly as we 
 wanted the Germans, but in the meantime 
 the Carbineers, still ahead of us, were on 
 the move, and some one — he might have 
 been our troop officer, or only a sergeant, 
 so sand -obliterated was all his rank— rode 
 swiftly down our lines and bade us hurry. 
 I like to think that he was only a sergeant, 
 though, because his language was not in 
 any sense befitting an officer ; but we were 
 mounted and moving off before he had 
 
128 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 got rid of the half of what he must have 
 wanted to say, and it didn't really matter 
 much, either way. 
 
 To our great surprise we had ridden only 
 a few hundred yards when we were ordered 
 to dismount again. The main body of the 
 Carbineers moved off a hundred yards or 
 so to our left, and halted. One squadron 
 of them handed over its horses, and made 
 for a lip of sand that ran obliquely across 
 our front to the plain below. Others, 
 among them the Intelligence men, were 
 creeping up to the crest of red sandstone 
 that towered up above us. To our right 
 was open desert. 
 
 " Look I " said a man suddenly to me, 
 ** there's the General." It was true. He 
 was there^ kneeling down at the extreme 
 left of the Carbineers festooning the ridge 
 in front. Captain Botha, his A.D.C., and 
 the son of South Africa's Prime Minister, 
 was with him. Both were staring through 
 field-glasses at something that was hidden 
 from us by the shoulder of the hill, and 
 while we watched I saw the General turn 
 and speak swiftly to his companions. A 
 moment later a Carbineer officer slipped 
 down from the bank and ran, crouching. 
 
A NIGHT RIDE, AND AFTER 129 
 
 in our direction. He was obviously excited, 
 and we watched him curiously. Arrived in 
 the hollow where we stood to our horses, 
 he jerked himself upright, and waved his 
 arms violently in our faces. For a moment 
 I half feared for his mind, and then I saw 
 that he was looking, not at us, but at the 
 ridge behind, and I turned and saw, 
 silhouetted against the sky, a group of 
 ammunition pack -mules. At all times, as 
 has been sung elsewhere, a mule is a mule, 
 but when he is perched against a skyline, 
 in full view of such of the enemy as may 
 be within a ten -mile radius, he looks, 
 sublimely, an ass. The man in charge of 
 them was obviously interested in the be- 
 haviour of the officer in the hollow, for he 
 stared curiously down at us. "Oh! you 
 
 dam fool ! you you dam fool ! Who 
 
 the blind blazes sent you up there? Come 
 to h — 11 out of it ! " I heard the officer- 
 man mutter — he did not dare to shout — 
 but it was of no avail, and the pantomime 
 might have gone on for some time had not 
 a group of Carbineers who were lying in 
 cover some fifty yards below the crest 
 scrambled up and awakened the muleteer 
 from his dream, and dragged and pushed 
 
 9 
 
I30 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 his reluctant beasts down the slope and into 
 the hollow. 
 
 " Consider yourself under arrest ! " The 
 words were barked at the now thoroughly 
 startled -looking custodian of the mules, and 
 the officer turned and bolted like a rabbit 
 back to the ridge. 
 
 " ' D ' Squadron ! . . . get mounted ! " 
 The order sent a quick thrill down the 
 line, and we lifted briskly to our saddles. 
 "Sections right! Tr-r-ot ! " and we were 
 off, swinging for the ridge whereon the 
 Carbineers lay. The order came again : 
 " Sections right ! " and as we turned a 
 rifle shot cracked in the dry air with the 
 sound of a whip, and on the instant after 
 the entire ridge blazed into a fury of rapid 
 fire. Of the enemy we could see nothing— 
 they were still hidden from us by the 
 sand-wall— nor could we tell if they were 
 firing back or not, although I can remem- 
 ber just how I glanced involuntarily to my 
 right to see if any saddles of my troop were 
 empty. A few seconds later we were in the 
 open. The firing ceased with that one 
 savage burst, but I do not think that we 
 were conscious of the fact for some time 
 afterwards. 
 
A NIGHT RIDE, AND AFTER 131 
 
 Close under the ridge lay a white horse, 
 its rider sitting up with both hands raised 
 above his head. We were quite close to 
 him, and could see that he looked more 
 astonished than frightened. Some yards 
 beyond these stood another horse, obviously 
 badly wounded— its back humped and its 
 head drooping. A figure in a blood-spat- 
 tered grey uniform lay untidily beneath it. 
 His right arm, smashed by a bullet, was 
 doubled back from the elbow ; the other 
 seemed to be twisted under the body. One 
 foot was still caught in a stirrup -iron, and 
 the upheld leg gave to the whole wretched 
 picture an air of horrid jauntiness that the 
 white face of the wounded man made only 
 more pronounced. 
 
 Then occurred the thing that was to 
 make of tragedy (for even killing your 
 enemy may be tragedy) farce. Our farrier- 
 sergeant, a gentleman chiefly notable in 
 that his tongue was as rough as his pro- 
 fessional rasp, and whose place was any- 
 where but where he happened to be— at the 
 head of the squadron— was seen to draw a 
 large pattern Army revolver, and charge 
 down upon the stricken German. For a 
 moment we hovered in wonderment at his 
 
132 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 manoeuvre, but when we saw him rein in, 
 and solemnly present his pistol at the un- 
 fortunate man's head, and heard him say, 
 in what his victim must have considered 
 quite unnecessarily loud tones : " Hands 
 
 up ! ye blaggard ! Hands up ! or I'll 
 
 blow yer head through yer chest ! " then, 
 
 then we just collapsed. Our officers, even, 
 forgot themselves and smiled, and we, pit 
 and gallery, non-commissioned officers and 
 men, yelled with laughter— a music-hall tour 
 de force. 
 
 After that, the third and last group that 
 we saw seemed superfluous, and, besides, 
 both horse and rider were too obviously 
 dead to be of much interest. 
 
 I have since come to the conclusion that 
 war is not in any sense a refined pastime. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 BIG GAME, BUT SMALL BAGS 
 
 Somehow, we seemed always to be playing 
 on the outer fringe of war. One fierce little 
 encounter only had there been — a sort of 
 " appetiser " before the dinner that we were 
 never really to taste ; since then— nothing ! 
 We had stalked blockhouses, surrounded 
 forts, had even hurled ourselves upon mili- 
 tary posts ; but the blockhouses had in- 
 variably proved to be empty, the forts 
 had borne the aspect of abandoned Kafir 
 stores, and closer inspection had shown 
 the military posts to be, as a rule, more 
 post (usually with a notice-board on the 
 top of it) than military. We suffered 
 gladly the hardships of long night-rides 
 to '' destinations unknown," and when, as 
 they invariably did, these expeditions ended 
 in nothing, we made a jest of our curses 
 and hoped for " better luck next time." 
 
 But the next time was the same, and the 
 
 133 
 
134 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 time after, and the time after that ; and now 
 after two long nights in the saddle, and a 
 day of pitiless, scourging sand-storm, the 
 great moment had come. " D " Squadron, 
 I.L.H., had been sent out, with the acrid 
 smell of cordite in its nostrils and the cold 
 grip of battle in the pit of its stomach, at 
 full gallop, to " do or die " against— three 
 very badly crumpled Germans . It was really 
 too funny. 
 
 This was not war. It was some new 
 game of which, as yet, we had not quite 
 got the hang. Gone from that moment 
 were the last lingering shreds of any respect 
 that we might have entertained for the 
 campaign, as a campaign. But what, 
 then, was it, if not a campaign? A picnic? 
 Assuredly not ! The hot -breathed sand- 
 storms ; the flies ; and the water— or, rather, 
 the want of water— denied the term with 
 a brutal emphasis . No ! it was a game 
 of sorts, and for myself, I began to 
 have a haunting suspicion that at some 
 time, somewhere, I had been through it 
 all before. Where, then? And how? For 
 the life of me I could not remember. 
 
 *' Seems pleased with himself," said a 
 voice near me, and I looked and saw 
 
BIG GAME, BUT SMALL^ BAGS 135 
 
 General Sir Duncan McKenzie talking to 
 our "old man," and smiling affably. A 
 minute later he left and strolLed over to 
 a bunch of Carbineers standing to their 
 horses at the base of the hill on our left. 
 He chatted to the officer in charge for a 
 few moments, and I could see him point- 
 ing towards the desert as though indicat- 
 ing some plan. "There," one could almost 
 hear him saying, " there I will have such 
 and such a troop posted ; this squadron will 
 
 move over there ; that squadron will ," 
 
 and a wave of the arm completed the 
 sentence . 
 
 And then I knew. Of course, it was not 
 war, or anything like war. It was a 
 partridge-drive. General McKenzie — his 
 ruddy face, his snow-white moustache, and 
 his general air of business-like geniality 
 making of him the pluperfect country gentle- 
 man—was our host. We were the guests; 
 there had already been one drive— not a 
 very successful one— and now we were 
 being assigned to our positions for the 
 next . 
 
 Then occurred the thing that was to 
 heighten to an almost absurd degree this 
 appearance of a typical country gentle- 
 
136 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 man directing a typical '' shoot." Thus 
 had I seen the thing happen, years before, 
 in an Enghsh countryside. 
 
 The General had left the Carbineers, 
 and was walking to some rising ground 
 where he would better be able to over- 
 look the '' guns," when he swung suddenly 
 half around, and stood for a moment as 
 if turned to stone . For a moment only ; 
 then— and I have some six hundred and 
 odd witnesses to support me, remember— 
 he shook his fist at something or some- 
 body that was hidden from us by the 
 swell of the ground. Then he shook 
 both fists, and then, as if he felt that 
 the display was inadequate, he brought 
 his lower limbs into play and actually 
 danced a few steps. His voice came 
 to us through the clear air, and— but, no I 
 it would not do. He is a General ; I 
 was only a corporal, and anyway, it was 
 not swearing ; it was pure oratory, of a 
 quality that should have bowed in silent 
 shame and envy the head of any squadron 
 sergeant-major within hearing. A breath- 
 less minute passed, and then — or so it 
 seemed to us who were watching — there 
 crawled out of the sand at the G.O.C.'s 
 
BIG GAME, BUT SMALL BAGS 137 
 
 feet an abject -looking officer-man. Host 
 and blundering under -keeper ; they faced 
 one another for a few moments, and then 
 the abject one drifted away on the flood 
 of rhetoric to strand eventually on the 
 sand-ridge behind which lay the three 
 crumpled Germans with their dead horses. 
 Arrived there, he shook himself and looked 
 over. What he saw seemed on the instant 
 to put new life into him, and he straightened 
 himself and became a fair understudy of 
 the exalted rage behind him. "What the 
 hell d'ye think y'are?" we heard him 
 ask. ". . . . blasted war correspondents? 
 Come out of it, you— you banana -fed 
 tourists ! " This was a gibe at the men 
 from Natal, and we chortled hugely 
 among ourselves. A short minute later, 
 when there appeared on the crest beside 
 him a group of unhappy-looking Car- 
 bineers armed with kodaks that they tried 
 in vain to hide behind their injured ex- 
 pressions, our mirth was helplessly open. 
 
 To them came the General. Mounted 
 now, and at the top of his form, one 
 short, staccato burst sufficed to place the 
 entire group under arrest. A sweep of his 
 arm seemed to include a troop standing to 
 
138 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 horses some fifty yards farther on. The 
 troop looked away with immediate osten- 
 tation, and the General turned to us. For 
 a moment I thought that he was going 
 to put us under arrest, too. " Colonel 
 D-n-lds-n ! " he began, " get your men 
 
 mounted, and take them " A wave of his 
 
 arm indicated the sweep of hills to our right 
 front, and then, as our CO. swung to his 
 saddle and rode forward to meet him, his 
 voice dropped and I could hear only frag- 
 ments : ". . . spoiled everything! . . . 
 you will . . . men . . . ride like the 
 devil ! " 
 
 Five minutes later we were in the open, 
 dust and the drum -thunder of hoofs upon 
 us, and the song of wind in our ears. 
 " Steady the pace ! " a voice shouted, and 
 the troop ahead seemed suddenly to lift 
 back at us out of the sand -haze. For 
 a moment, as we reined in, was a desperate 
 confusion of sections driving through broken 
 sections before them, and of troops as 
 orderless as herds of panic -ridden antelope. 
 A matter of seconds only, and then the 
 broken back of the column mended some- 
 how, and we swept forward again. But the 
 pace was steadier. 
 
BIG GAME, BUT SMALL BAGS 139 
 
 It was a day of clouds. A sky, fiercely 
 blue, was burning great holes in the sag- 
 bellied vapour overhead, and the desert's 
 face about us was fungus -blotched with 
 shadow. Miles away to our right the hills 
 that guard Tschaukaib stood up blackly 
 against the white promise of the rain. 
 Upon the knees of the red hills along 
 whose marge we rode was a hint of 
 greenery, and here and there, between 
 the shifting cloud-shadows, the dead-white 
 glare of the open sands below us was 
 tempered with the same soft touch. The 
 miles fled past us. Shadows stood out of 
 the distances, became real hills, sidled past, 
 and were gone. Once, there was a tree 
 —the first we had seen in the country— 
 and the wonder of it held every man of 
 us agape until it became lost in the dust- 
 haze behind. 
 
 Shortly afterwards the hills ended 
 abruptly, and a field of sand-dunes, all 
 silver-soft in that soft light, shut us sud- 
 denly in. Here was heavy going indeed, 
 but no slackening of pace. The old, familiar 
 curtain of dust rose up about us and hid 
 everything. Through it there came the 
 sudden, shrill blast of a whistle, followed 
 
I40 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 by a sound of struggling. A voice cursed 
 briefly, and some one, or it may have been 
 two or three, laughed. A riderless horse 
 plunged past us. "That's so-and-so's 
 mare," a man in my section said. " Won- 
 der why he's off?" A moment later 
 and he— we, all knew. There was a sud- 
 den check in the sections before us— for 
 all the world as though the troop had 
 charged into an immense plum -pudding 
 —and then my horse's hindquarters dropped 
 away from behind me, and his head shot 
 up into the clouds. I clung on grimly, 
 and watched, with a sort of horrified 
 fascination, the straining hindquarters of 
 a perpendicular beast somewhat to my 
 right, and, seemingly, miles above me. 
 The animal was a strawberry roan, and 
 
 I recognized it as H 's mount, and I 
 
 remember, too, that I wondered stupidly 
 
 where H was until my own beast's 
 
 head and rump resumed their normal 
 horizontal relationship with a jerk that 
 nearly shot me out of the saddle, and 
 I looked up to find a very breathless 
 
 H holding on to the bridle of a strav/- 
 
 berry roan as scandalized -looking as him- 
 self. 
 
BIG GAME, BUT SMALL BAGS 141 
 
 We were on the roof of a sand-dune, 
 and partly for curiosity's sake, and partly 
 to tighten a girth which had slipped, I dis- 
 mounted to peer over the edge. What 
 the angle was of that steeply tilted wall 
 up which we had ridden I do not know. 
 And even if I did know, I would not 
 write it here because I should not ex- 
 pect to be believed. The slope— call it 
 that if you will— was not an inch short of 
 forty feet, anyway, and it was as steeply 
 tilted as— as a walking-stick ; which in- 
 formation, I know, conveys less than 
 nothing, and is therefore the best possible 
 kind of information under the circum- 
 stances . 
 
 Surprises came quickly after that. The 
 dune -field narrowed until it was less than 
 a hundred yards across, and we became 
 aware of three horsemen— mere specks in 
 the white distance — making in our direc- 
 tion. They could only be Germans, and 
 we rode cheerfully forward to meet them. 
 There was little of order in our going. 
 Some half-dozen men of my troop, 
 separated from us by a gulf of deep 
 sand, rode in a forlorn independence at 
 some one hundred and fifty yards dis- 
 
142 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 tance, and a group — unassorted — of men 
 from other troops jogged sheepishly behind 
 us, and tried to look as if they belonged. 
 A riderless horse, treading stiff-legged on 
 clouds of disdain, jinked loftily by as though 
 the saddle slewed under its belly were a 
 mark of honoured distinction conferred for 
 the losing of its rider down some wall of 
 sand. 
 
 There was a curious lack of excitement 
 about the prooeedings. The Germans were 
 hidden from view for a time by a lofty 
 dune that seemed to stand on the shoulders 
 of its fellows. There was plenty of time, 
 however. They were coming in our 
 direction, so what need to hurry? We 
 reined in to a walk, and finally, in response 
 to an order, dismounted and strolled to a 
 lip of sand overlooking the white plain 
 before us. A vast plain it was, ringed 
 about with hills. A distant sky-line was 
 dotted with specks advancing in open forma- 
 tion, and a helio winked restlessly from 
 somewhere on our left front. Nearer at 
 hand, but still at some two thousand yards 
 range, was a small group of horsemen, and 
 from them, as we watched, came a sudden 
 sputter of rifle -fire, but at whom they 
 
BIG GAME, BUT SMALL BAGS 143 
 
 had fired we could not say. Through 
 field-glasses it was possible to see that 
 one of their horses limped badly as it 
 moved along. Our own three Germans — 
 and it was impossible to avoid a feeling 
 of proprietorship in regard to them as 
 they rode trustingly towards us — were 
 now within some six or seven hundred 
 yards, and the soft ** snick " of a rifle - 
 bolt pushed home by some one near me 
 struck a note that was all grim. 
 
 Nothing — I had almost said the ** in- 
 evitable nothing " — was to happen, how- 
 ever. At five hundred yards the three 
 caught sight of us, and reined in. For a 
 few brief moments they gazed at us like 
 startled buck, and then their hands went 
 up in token of surrender. 
 
 Half an hour later, when we rejoined 
 the Carbineers at Rutkuppes proper — the 
 capital letters which had meant so much to 
 us spelt, in this case, one dilapidated tin 
 hut and a tarnished name -board — we found 
 that they, too, had bagged a brace and a 
 half of Germans. 
 
 Of the three, one was a heavy -faced 
 man of middle age ; another, a little 
 person with round shoulders and heavy 
 
144 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 gold -rimmed spectacles, looked like a 
 student. (We learned afterwards that he 
 had been a chemist's assistant in Luder- 
 itzbucht.) The third was a pleasant- 
 looking boy of about nineteen. All three 
 wore the corduroy uniform of the reservist, 
 and looked vastly different to the scouting 
 party which, at Stettin on September the 
 25th, had stood up to the squadron of us 
 until they were all shot down with one 
 exception, and that exception had only 
 surrendered when his rifle was empty. I 
 felt rather sorry for these men. With the 
 exception, perhaps, of the boy of nineteen, 
 they looked cowed and miserable. The little 
 fellow with the gold -rimmed glasses was 
 trembling violently — we were told afterwards 
 that his hands had had to be forcibly 
 pulled down, so anxious was he to emphasize 
 the completeness of his surrender — and the 
 heavy-faced man was twisting and un- 
 twisting his fingers, and he muttered occa- 
 sionally to himself. An interesting sight 
 even if a little nauseating. 
 
 Surrounding the prisoners was a dense 
 crowd of Carbineers, and out of their 
 gaping regard arose the touch of inevitable 
 humour that marked everything that was 
 
BIG GAME, BUT SMALL BAGS 145 
 
 said, or done, or thought, in that pantomime 
 campaign. Through the silence of deep 
 interest that held the crowd came an 
 awestruck whisper. " Golly ! " it said. 
 " What fierce-looking brutes ! " 
 
 10 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 WAR'S GRIM JESTS AND MORALS 
 
 '' We sat down in the sand and played 
 auction bridge, and the people at home 
 called it * war ' ! " 
 
 This, the least flattering, and certainly 
 the briefest description of our campaign 
 that I have so far heard, was said to me 
 by a man of my squadron whom I met 
 in Cape Town months after the word 
 " German " had been wiped off the map of 
 South-Western Africa. It is true that in 
 earlier sketches I have emphasized the fact 
 that we did little more in G.S.W.A. than 
 play with war; but to call it auction bridge 
 — well ! to every man his own especial type 
 of reminiscences, and perhaps— who can 
 say ? — the embittered one may have held bad 
 cards . 
 
 The gambler (I cannot for the moment 
 recall the less emphatic expression) may 
 
 remember chiefly the strange conditions 
 
 146 
 
WAR'S GRIM JESTS 147 
 
 under which he has revoked ; your real, 
 hardened citizen, on the other hand, may 
 look back with a mild or wild surprise 
 — the degree of his astonishment depend- 
 ing, of course, upon the degree of his 
 hardness — to the outstanding fact that he 
 learned in the desert to look upon mere 
 water as a precious beverage ; the mind 
 of the small despot will dwell, to the 
 exclusion of almost everything else, upon 
 the corporal's or sergeant's stripes that 
 were his, or upon the " favouritism " — a 
 word dear to the patriot under arms — that 
 kept him undecorated ; while for myself 
 I can say that by few things in that cam- 
 paign of hard-edged ennui was I more im- 
 pressed in the end than by the truth of art 
 oil-painting which I saw in Luderitzbucht 
 within a day or so of our landing. 
 
 A man, dying of thirst, blood -red as to 
 the colour of him, and hideous hate and 
 suffering as to all else of him, was lying 
 upon a vivid orange sand-dune, and 
 cursing with his eyes, and mouth, and 
 feeble, outstretched arm a blue, smiling sea 
 — the water that was of no use to him — 
 that mocked at him from across a beach 
 of purple -streaked white sand. The woman 
 
148 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 who shoiwed me the picture informed me 
 that it was the work of a young artist 
 who had given it to her when he left for 
 Germany. " He did not care to take it 
 with him/' she said, and then, seeing me 
 smile, added : " Ah I wait until you have 
 been in the desert for a year, and then 
 come back and look at it again." 
 
 It did not need anything like a year, 
 however, for me to become convinced that 
 the artist was right. What, exactly, 
 brought about the change I do not know, 
 but perhaps it was only the natural out- 
 come of existence in a country wherein 
 was no living thing save yourself and 
 your fellows, and the men whom you de- 
 sired to kill, and who desired to kill you ; 
 where was neither beast nor bird, nor any 
 sound save the great soundful silence of the 
 winds, the still music that could be heard 
 sometimes in the purple and scarlet of 
 dawn and dusk, and in the shimmering 
 fury of white-hot noon. 
 
 At Luderitzbucht there is a devil -inspired 
 mirage, which day by day paints across the 
 sky a wonder picture of the sea. When 
 first I saw it I sat down on the sand and 
 thought quickly. Then I said to myself: 
 
WAR'S GRIM JESTS 149 
 
 ** How funny ! . . . but of course it isn't ! 
 How could it be?" Then I looked again, 
 and was not quite so sure. The word 
 " mirage " rose glibly enough to my lips, 
 it is true, but did anything that I had 
 ever heard or read of mirages justify it? 
 I asked the question of myself quite 
 seriously. 
 
 Mirages are not common objects at home, 
 and most of our knowledge concerning them 
 had been gleaned from the fiction of a 
 past generation. We had even vaguely 
 understood of them that they were a species 
 of ** visitation " which manifested them- 
 selves only to people who were dying of 
 thirst, and then only in the form of oases 
 or other places where one could obtain 
 drinks. We might have supposed, indeed, 
 that they went out of fashion when drinking, 
 as a pastime, came in. A mirage repre- 
 senting an American cock -tail bar would 
 certainly be a tough nut for mere imagina- 
 tion to crack, and, anyway, I was not dying 
 of thirst, or, even if I nearly was, the sea 
 didn't tempt me, so that it did not prove 
 very much either way. 
 
 A still, glassy sea it was, marbled with 
 shoal-water, and staked with rocks, and 
 
I50 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 edged with a coquettish display of white 
 foam, but in the endeavour to convey to 
 others something of its impression upon my 
 own mind I confess I find a difficulty in 
 avoiding too lavish a use of the coloured 
 phrase. As a matter of cold, sober fact — if 
 there can be any sobriety at all in such a 
 recollection— there was nothing clear-cut 
 about this amazing sky-picture. Its horizon 
 was all vague and formless — just such a 
 horizon as one may see when looking at a 
 real ocean on one of those days of muffled 
 sunlight, when sky and water seem merged 
 together in a shimmer of grey light. Its 
 foam-faced rocks were a-haze with heat and 
 distance, and at times there would grow 
 upon the wide canvas dark patches that 
 might have been caused by a sudden wind 
 upon the make-believe waters, or — might 
 not. 
 
 At Luderitzbucht itself the mirage was 
 only occasionally, and then only very faintly, 
 visible, but at Kolmanskuppe, some nine 
 miles inland, it was almost a permanent 
 feature of the landscape, and I have known 
 men of the infantry regiments stationed 
 there so lost to all sense of proportion and 
 the fitness of things as nearly to come to 
 
WAR'S GRIM JESTS 151 
 
 blows over the hotly debated question of 
 the apparition's status quo ; and I know of 
 one man, at least, who staked a whole 
 month's pay upon his conviction that it 
 was the sea, and not any trick of desert - 
 magic or chicanery of cloud, as his fellows 
 asserted. 
 
 That the changed psychology of men who 
 have been in the desert for a month or so 
 is partly due to actual affection of the eye- 
 sight I have little doubt. No man, surely, 
 may spend any length of time in the blind, 
 white glare of those desert -belts, where each 
 morning finds him staring through sand- 
 encrusted eyes at a colour -drunken dawn, 
 and where, at noon, the high hills dance 
 together in the flickering heat haze, and 
 the flat lands quiver and swim across tor- 
 tured sight, without, eventually, ** seeing 
 things," and, what is infinitely worse, be- 
 lieving in them. 
 
 Not every day was altogether bad, how- 
 ever. I have known as much as a whole 
 week pass without a .sandstorm really 
 worthy of the name, and there were rare 
 days, too, when a soft wind would blow 
 up from the sea and with it a kindly old 
 sea-mist which would help us to endure. 
 
152 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 November the 14th will for ever remain 
 a day memorable in the chequered annals 
 of " D " Squadron. 
 
 At sunrise, or shortly after, we were 
 disturbed from our usual contemplation 
 of the sand about us by the sound of 
 a motor engine throbbing on the still air. 
 Around us the desert looked rather more 
 illimitable than usual, and as bare of motor 
 traffic as of icebergs. The east was afire 
 with early sunlight, and out of it the 
 deep drone of the engine beat down upon 
 us in solid waves of sound. Louder, 
 louder — a shadow dropped upon us from 
 the skies, and fled away down the sands, 
 and—" Look ! " said a man suddenly, 
 ** there's an aeroplane ! " He spoke in the 
 conversational tone of one who would say, 
 " Look I there's a rainbow I " and we all, as 
 casually as one who would reply, " So 
 there is ! " turned and peered in the direc- 
 tion indicated by his outstretched hand. 
 Why, at this point, we felt no particular 
 surprise, nor sensed the faintest premoni- 
 tion of what was coming to us, I shall never 
 know. A dark blur swam slowly across the 
 sun's path ; slowly, slowly — ah ! The sudden 
 murmur of voices sounded underneath the 
 
WAR'S GRIM JESTS 153 
 
 engine's clatter, and the Taube, with wings 
 a -tilt, stood out in clear relief against 
 the blue flame of the sky. A confused mur- 
 mur of interest broke from the watching 
 groups: "By Jove! doesn't it look fine?" 
 ' Scouting, I suppx)se," " Wish I was up 
 there." The Taube was turning in our 
 direction. It tilted a little more steeply, 
 hung so for a brief instant, and then the 
 planes levelled themselves ; there was a 
 quiver or two, and some little rocking — as 
 of a seagull balancing to a head -wind — the 
 powerful exhaust of the engine roared 
 down the still air, and — '* Look out ! he's 
 dropping bombs I " some one shouted. 
 Instinct, rather than sense of ourselves, 
 scattered us like leaves before the wind. 
 There was a sound above us like the 
 savage cracking noise that is sometimes 
 heard in the heart of thunder — a giant 
 stuttering in wrath — and a sense of things 
 dropping swiftly. There followed an in- 
 stant when the sky fell upon us with a 
 crushing weight of utter silence, and the 
 earth held its breath. Then — the explosion 
 was very near, remember — the firmaments 
 shouted aloud in a thunder -clap of sound ; 
 and the four dimensions danced drunkenly 
 
154 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 together, and all that we saw, we who lay 
 where we had flung ourselves upon the 
 sand, or who ran, not knowing why, nor 
 whither, was a feather-headed tower of 
 dust that stood up and bowed gravely to 
 us before it began to droop and drift 
 away. 
 
 It is no easy thing, this piecing together 
 of the fragments of memory wherewith to 
 make a story— fragments of things seen 
 swiftly, and, as it were, in a haze, and of 
 things felt, for the most part, subconsciously. 
 He who would paint such a picture must, 
 above all, be honest with himself, and 
 must remember, too, that he cannot attem'pt 
 to retain on paper that dignity which he 
 has cast utterly away in the sands . 
 
 From the middle of November onwards 
 the aeroplane became a more or less 
 regular feature of our lives, and by its aid 
 we were enabled to reduce our weather fore- 
 casts to within the limits of an epigram : 
 " If it blows — hell ! if it doesn't— bombs ! " 
 Strangely enough, we preferred it not to 
 blow . 
 
 Thirty seconds of bomb - dodging, we 
 argued, was better anyway than twelve 
 hours of burrowing in sand to escape sand. 
 
WAR'S GRIM JESTS 155 
 
 and besides, once the panicky novelty of 
 the Taube had worn off we found more of 
 humour in its visits, and less of that empty 
 feeling at the pit of the stomach which — 
 as you apply it to yourself or to others — is 
 called variously " excitement " and " fear." 
 
 For instance, neither excitement nor fear 
 were present, but only laughter, choking 
 and helpless, when, some weeks later, the 
 airman disturbed us at Divine Service in the 
 sands . 
 
 From the beginning of things we had 
 always regarded that Sunday morning ser- 
 vice as something of an imposition. In a 
 country where there was no visible tempta- 
 tion, this al fresco salvation seemed to us 
 a distinct waste of good leisure time, and 
 we barely, listened to the droning voice ex- 
 horting us in terms of the Old Testament 
 to soul-heroics as forceful as out of date. 
 Now and again some one in the neighbour- 
 hood of the pulpit— a colour-sergeant looking 
 for promotion in both worlds, probably — 
 would chant through his nose the opening 
 bars of a hymn, and we would rise and 
 shuffle our feet until the noise ceased and 
 we could sit down again. 
 
 At what period of the service, whether 
 
156 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 before or after the De Profundts, the 
 interruption came, I am at a loss to say. I 
 know that upon one moment I was looking 
 at the ragged toe-caps of my boots and 
 wondering how long they, would last, and 
 upon the next I was on my feet shouting 
 into a chorus of hundreds : " Aeroplane 1 
 aeroplane ! " 
 
 It was a biplane this time, and it was 
 travelling at an immense speed towards us. 
 There was no mistaking its objective. The 
 hundreds of us massed together in one spot 
 must have presented too tempting a mark, 
 and the roar of its engine grew in our ears 
 almost faster than our minds grasj>ed the 
 fact that Divine Service, for the day at 
 leasts was ended. 
 
 But was it? We still stood in something 
 of the congregational order in which we 
 had been paraded earlier on that morning, 
 and there, on the impromptu pulpit, and 
 looking like a black exclamation mark 
 against the pale sky, still remained the 
 surpliced figure which had held all but our 
 attention for the full hour past. The form 
 of subjugation to herd-principles which is 
 known as " discipline " held us rooted to the 
 spot . What would the padre do ? We were 
 under orders. He was the most tangible 
 
WAR'S GRIM JESTS 157 
 
 expression of those orders in sight, and we 
 watched him as sheep may watch the old 
 bell-wether of the floCk. 
 
 Our suspense was soon over. Twice the 
 padre craned his neck and looked upwards 
 at the 'plane, now circling almost directly, 
 overhead, and twice he looked down at the 
 book in his hand. To me, watching, it 
 seemed that he was debating in his mind 
 some question of comparative values, which, 
 taking everything into consideration, he 
 might very well have been doing. One 
 more upward glance he gave, and then, 
 with an almost indescribably feminine grace 
 of action, swept up the skirts of his 
 surplice, and— there is no other expression 
 for it — bolted like a rabbit. 
 
 The fact that no one was killed, or even 
 injured, by the bombs that followed was 
 completely lost sight of in the helpless 
 laughter that held us at intervals through- 
 out the remainder of that memorable Sunday. 
 
 What remains to be said of a campaign 
 in which bombs during Divine 'Service made 
 us laugh, and whereby those who took part 
 gained nothing but an imperishable memory 
 of thirst, and a robust and practical philo- 
 sophy of the sort that made the Irishman 
 whom I have quoted earlier in this record 
 
158 WITH BOTHA'S ARMY 
 
 " praise the Saints thim ants have no bones 
 into thim ! " 
 
 Listen to a group of us talking — I speak 
 not of myself, of course, for I have talked 
 much in these pages — and between the 
 adjectives you will hear much of quaint 
 trifles that do not, properly speaking, belong 
 to war, and very little of the grim things 
 that do . 
 
 A page of photographs, taken at random 
 from almost any English weekly paper, will 
 hold more of real war than the combined 
 experiences of all of us could show, and 
 therein, as you may guess, lies the key to 
 our reticence. 
 
 You cannot photograph discomfort, or a 
 sandstorm, or thirst, any more than you 
 can photograph humour. 
 
 Ah ! if you could, you would understand 
 why the curse and the jest are the language 
 of campaigns, and why this faithful narra- 
 tive must convey a dispiriting sense of much 
 continuously suffered and little occasionally 
 achieved. It is the fault of war : for among 
 the finished operations of war General 
 Botha's drive of the Germans in South West 
 Africa really stands out as brilliantly con- 
 ceived, swiftly carried out, and emphatically 
 successful. 
 
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 This book is an attempt to give in broad outline a just estimate of the European system, or rathe 
 the European anarchy, with especial reference to the underlying causes of the war and th 
 possibilities of a movement towards better things in the future. 
 
 THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 
 
 By H. M. HYNDMAN. Crown 8vo, Cloth, 2s. 6d. net 
 Essays on the great social and political forces of our time. The author has seen many change 
 in Europe, and is able, from the fullness of his knowledge, to forecast the probable course of event 
 and to drive home his warnings of long ago, which are already being largely justified. 
 
 WAR AND CIVILIZATION 
 
 By the Rt. Hon. J. M. ROBERTSON, M.P. Crown 8vo, Cloth, 2s. 6d. net. 
 Professor Steffen has produced a book in which he justifies the policy of Germany In terms of h< 
 Imperial need for expansion and her " Kultur," and he considers incredible the charges brough 
 against her by the Allies, even as regards the Invasion of Belgium. Mr. Robertson, putting nl 
 reply In the form of an Open Letttr, traverses the whole case, analysing the political and th 
 sociological argument, and presenting a strong counter indictment. 
 
 THE WAR AND THE BALKANS 
 
 By NOEL BUXTON, M.P., and CHARLES R. BUXTON. Crown 8vo, Clotl 
 
 2s. 6d. net ; also in Paper, is. net. [Second Editiot 
 
 " This extremely important book deserves the widest notice, for it broaches an earnest questio 
 
 of policy, upon which the authors have a unique claim to pronounce an opinion."— Land an 
 
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 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 
 
 By FRANK J. ADKINS, M.A. Crown 8vo, 2S. td. net. 
 " Mr. lAdkins writes as an historian and observer of events. His general attitude is one wit 
 which many people will sympathize — ' We shall probably win, but we don't deserve to,' a whol( 
 some line of thouglit, and Mr. Adkins has done well to drive it home."— T/w Times. 
 
 ABOVE THE BATTLE 
 
 By ROMAIN ROLLAND. Translated by C. K. Ogden, M.A. Cr. 8vo, Cloth, 25. 6d. ne: 
 The author of " Jean Christophe" has not been silent during the past eighteen months, and all th 
 Essays and Letters which he has written since the outbreak of the war have been translated by M 
 C. K.' Ogden, M.A., and are included in this volume. They are splendid examples of the lucidity an 
 breadth of view which characteilze all Holland's work, and are among the few pieces of llteratut 
 which will survive the war. 
 
 THE COMING SCRAP OF PAPER 
 
 By EDWARD W. ESDALL. Crown 8vo, Cloth, 2s. 6d. net. 
 This book shows that the gold standard upon which our whole national life is based has fo 
 many years past been undermined by paper money, and has, in fact, already been virtuall 
 destroyed, and how the way to beneficial alterations has been opened. 
 
 THE HEALING OF NATIONS 
 
 By EDWARD CARPENTER. Crown 8vo, Cloth, 2S. 6d. net; Paper, 25. net. 
 
 [Third Editiot 
 " Profoundly interesting. Well worth most careful attention.'" — Observer. 
 
 " Will be studied eagerly by the very large number of people who prize the eloquent teaching c 
 this humane and sincere thinker."— Manchester Guardian. 
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH RURAL LIFE 
 
 FROM THE SAXON INVASION TO THE PRESENT DA^ 
 
 By MONTAGUE FORDHAM, M.A. Large Crown 8vo, 2s. 6d. net. 
 A book not only written by a countryman for people Interested in English country life, but 
 handbook for students, well schemed, and full of valuable information. _ 
 
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