A still lagoon of veld, mile upon mile. Nowhere in the world, I should suppose, does the tide of battle ebb and flow so almost imperceptibly. Sometimes, only in echo, we hear the thunder of the overwhelming seas—sometimes, just now and then, the ripple at our feet breaks in a little cloud of spray and for a moment dims the eyes that are used to vast spaces, with sudden yearning for an island home beneath the far horizon, and perhaps hands tremble a little in tearing the wrapper from the daily newspaper.
But enough for us, so far, has been our all unequal struggle with Nature, who turns our skies to steel and with fierce winds scatters the hovering clouds, while the young crops shrivel and the watersprings are dry and the eyes of the beasts wait upon us who can give them no meat in due season.
A Kaffir boy comes round one evening and sings a doggerel he has fashioned from an old nigger melody, and others join in the foolish refrain:
We laugh and throw him a tickey, and turn again to watch the skies—to-morrow, perhaps, the rains will come and we can plough and sow. For the dread hand that writes upon the wall has formed no fearful word for us—as yet—and sympathy, deep and very real as it is, stands in our lexicon as ‘a feeling for’ rather than ‘a feeling with.’
And then a cable calls me in haste to Durban to meet a returning transport and suddenly there is nothing in the world but war and its magnificence and its horror. The clusters of people at various stations who come to meet the mail train—the event of the day—the youths who slouch up and down the platform with loud voices and noisy jests, the girls who laugh with them, the groups of farmers talking of the crops—all these rouse me to a feeling of irritation, then to an impotent anger.
‘Come with me,’ I want to urge, ‘and I will take you where men are heroes in life and death.’ And again, ‘Is it nothing to you that your brothers agonise? Will you jest while the earth opens under your feet?’—and something ominous creeps into the meaningless laughter.
And then at last comes Durban, and I am surrounded with war activities and what was sinister has vanished in the wholesomeness of sacrifice and strenuous work.
To hundreds here war work has become their daily life. The town is always full of soldiers—Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans—coming and going. Here is a company of New Zealanders winding up the street. From a balcony I watch them marching with a fine swing—well set-up, stalwart fellows. Someone comes with a tray of cigarettes and we throw packets down amongst them, and their upturned, laughing boyish faces ask for more. Youngsters all of these, eager for happiness, eager for a slap at the Germans, and to ‘see life’—and their destination is the battlefield of Flanders! At the corner they dismiss and there is a race for the rickshaws; three crowd into one, and the Zulu boy gladly sweats up the incline and capers and leaps when the downward slope relieves him, knowing that for his brief exertion he will ask and get six times his lawful fee. His ostrich feathers wave, his black limbs flash, and the passengers lean back and laugh.
And the other side of the picture—a shipload of returning Australians, on crutches, arms in slings, helpless on wheeled chairs, with the look of the trenches on the brave faces that smile their grateful thanks. For to each and all Durban has a warm welcome. While they still lie off the Point, a girl signaller bids them come to the Y.M.C.A. Hut for all that they want, ladies from the Patriotic League wait on the wharf with supplies of cigarettes and fruit, motor-cars and carriages stop to pick up stragglers and carry them home to dinner, to a concert or theatre, and the Hut itself tempts with open doors to the comforts within, to the tables strewn with magazines and papers, to the letter-writing facilities and varied games, to the most excellent meals, where one penny will give a hungry man a liberal helping of cold meat or an appetising plate of fish mayonnaise, while a second penny provides the steaming cup.
Down on the Point a little crowd has gathered. The steamer is a day late, and wives and mothers sit and wait, or restlessly ply any and all with endless reiterate questions, or hold impatiently to a telephone receiver. And the night falls, and along the beach gardens the coloured lights hang in jewelled strings against the dark. A drizzle of rain makes a halo of their blurred radiance, the band plays, the few wanderers—the last of the holiday-makers—talk of their homeward journey, for the summer and the beginning of the season of rains are with us. Far out in the bay a mast-head light springs up, then more lights, a stir of excitement in the gathering crowd at the Point, and slowly the tug leads the transport to her moorings.
‘Stand back—stand back! Make way there!’ and with a whir of starting engines, the motor ambulances steer their way through the pressing crowd, and slowly the stretcher-bearers carry their freight along the lower deck and round the difficult angle of the lowered gangway. In silence this, and the greetings are very quiet as the waiting women meet their loved ones again—for this great steamer with her rows of decks and wide accommodation holds but the remnant of a regiment. Fifteen hundred strong they marched through Durban nine months ago, and how many have not returned! Fever, dysentery, debility, starvation, wounds and death—these have all taken their toll.
I suppose there are few parts of the world which nature has made more difficult to the intruder than German East Africa. In the forest the thorny creepers join tree to tree in close high walls until the very stars—man’s only guide—are hidden, nearly all the trees also are a-bristle with protecting spears, sharp as needles to pierce and tear the flesh, and to leave behind, it may be, a poisoned festering sore. Mountain ranges throw their boulders and tear their gaping chasms in the way, the streams, too few and far between for thirsty man, are torrents to be crossed on fallen logs, on slimy boulders where one sees the sudden agony flash in the eyes of a laden mule that slips, and with a struggle of frantic hoofs is tossed to death. A herd of elephants crashes like thunder through the scrub, trumpeting their suspicion of man’s presence, the lions prowling unheard startle with a sudden hungry roar and seek their meat from God.
Then come the swamps where the crocodile lies in the slime, and snakes coil, and the mosquito goes about its deadly work. Men sink to their waists in mud, the transports break down—all are tried in vain, ox waggons, mule carts, motor-cars, ‘and then we go hungry,’ said one man to me. Gaunt and weak, with eyes too bright for health, he smiled and spoke lightly—a least trembling of the hands, a twitch of a muscle, a look behind the smiling eyes which no laugh could quite conceal, these the only signs of the over-strained, still quivering nerves. He told me the story of how the flour supply ran out, of how the pangs of hunger were eased with the flesh of donkey or rhinoceros. For eight days the hungry men waited and watched and then a transport laden with sacks appeared—and the sacks held newspapers!
Another spoke. ‘The worst thing that ever I went through was in the — valley. Will you ever forget it, Mike? We were going into action along one of those awful winding elephant tracks through grass above our heads—sort of maze, and you don’t know where you’ll find yourself next minute, perhaps back where you came from, or perhaps in a clearing, looking into the muzzle of a machine gun—can’t see a foot ahead. Suddenly the Boches opened fire, and at the very same moment we were attacked by a swarm of bees. Sounds funny, but I can tell you it wasn’t. There were millions of ’em, going for us all they were worth. The horses and pack-mules went near mad and there were we, blind and dazed, stumbling along trying to keep the brutes from our faces and the enemy’s fire dropping around. Pretty sights we were when they’d finished with us—my two eyes were bunged up so I’d just a slit to see through, and hands so stiff and swollen I could scarce bend my fingers.’
‘My worst day,’ and another took up the tale, ‘was just when we were at our worst off for food—fair starved we were, and just at daybreak a family of rhinos came charging through our camp—Pa and Ma and a lot of rum little coves scooting after them. Well, thinks I, a slice of Pa would come in very handy grilled, so off I treks with two or three chaps after me, and there, far below the rise, was a vlei and a whole lot of rhinos standing round. Worse luck, as we got down, we found it just chock-a-block with crocodiles. You hardly see them at first, but just look close and you see a mud-bank sort of heave and here and there you’ll get the glimpse of a great wide jaw, the colour of the mud and as still, never moving an inch, but with eyes watching the rhinos all the time. I tell you we didn’t go any too close, but we were mortal hungry, so we tried to edge round to the rhinos, keeping well clear of the mud and slime. One huge awkward-looking brute was a bit away from the others and the swamp, so we let fly and brought him down, staggering and falling not very far from us—but by God, if these crocs hadn’t ripped out and got him before we had a show, and so we didn’t get dinner that day. As nasty brutes as you’d care to see, those crocs. A chap of ours shot one of ’em one day and cut it open, and inside he found an anklet ornament and a ring. How’s that for an ugly story? At another camp a horse went down to the river to drink all serene, no sign of another living thing—when sudden up comes a grinning jaw, and like a flash of light, it snaps on the poor beast’s nose and pulls him in, and there was an end of him.’
In the more open country grows the giant grass, waving over a man’s head, dense and resistant as sugar-cane, and once a source of deathly peril. The regiment had dug itself in some 300 yards from the enemy trenches, when the wind, blowing in their faces, brought to the men a smell of burning, and with a sudden roar a sea of flames came sweeping down upon them—the enemy had set fire to the tall grass. There was not a second to spare. The men leaped up and, weak and exhausted as they were, forced their failing strength into clearing the ground and cutting a fire belt. It was done with the speed of demons, for a fiercer demon was upon them; the men with their tattered garments that would have flared up so easily, put half a life into those few seconds.
The heat of the fire was on their faces, blinding their eyes, the flames reached out tongues towards their store of ammunition. Under cover of the fire and smoke the enemy came out and attacked heavily. Our men leaped back, turned the full strength of their fire on the enemy through the blinding smoke, and suddenly, miraculously—the wind changed! It is gratifying to know that in a few moments the enemy survivors were hurried back to their trenches before the flames, to find their grass shelters on fire, and under a withering storm from every rifle, maxim, and gun a grim silence fell upon their trenches.
And so Nature, whose gigantic forces have joined our enemy’s in this war against us, for once played him false; but the Hun is always quick to turn her help to his best advantage. He sees to it that every post, detached house, village, kraal, &c., has the protection of a ‘boma’—a thick impenetrable fence made of thorn trees, with the huge strong spikes thrust outwards and the smooth butts inside the shelter, made of such height and depth as is necessary to resist the onslaught of elephant and rhinoceros and the cunning of the lion. All around a wide thorn carpet is spread to pierce the feet of the intruder. Imagine such a ‘boma’ flanked by rifle and machine-gun fire from deep trenches concealed by cover and by a ‘false boma’ in rear which makes the boma line apparently continuous—and a frontal attack by infantry becomes a hazardous undertaking.
‘Could not the artillery destroy them?’ I asked, and was told of the difficulties of locating the trenches for this purpose and of the unlimited supply of high-explosive shells that would be required. All approaches to defended posts have lanes cut through the bush, and these are so arranged in irregular shape that every open piece of ground can be covered by machine-gun and cross rifle fire.
Of the hardships of the march, of the hunger and thirst—once a battle was fought for two days before a drop of water could be obtained—of the fever and exhaustion, I could guess from watching the speakers, and from the men’s talk to each other I heard of the skilfully posted machine guns alert for a fleeting glimpse of troops grouped, perhaps, round a wounded man, of the snipers in the trees, of the maxims fired from the backs of animals clothed in grass, of the danger of horrors and mutilation should a wounded man fall into the hands of the Askari. All of this I was told freely; but of the endurance, the magnificent self-oblation, the comradeship and devotion, these came to my ears only from those who had commanded troops and who could barely speak of these things for a catch in the throat.
The actual warfare, the battles, the bayonet charges, the fervour and courage of attack—these are described by newspaper correspondents in cables and despatches; but of the more human side—‘the soul of the war’—few tales reach the outside world. The courage of endurance, the absence of one word of complaint from men so weak, latterly, that five miles a day sometimes had to be the limit of their march—who shall tell of these?
Hear one last story from an outsider.
‘That regiment of yours is very thick with its companion regiment, the Nth,’ he said. ‘A chap who is in the Nth told me the one regiment never loses a chance of doing the other a good turn. Once, he said, the Nth were in the first firing line, only 150 yards from the enemy. There had been no chance of getting water-bottles filled, and the men’s tongues were swollen with thirst. The other chaps were suffering a lot too, but what do you think they did? All the regiment, officers and men, sent up every bottle that had a drain left in it to the fellows of the Nth, and mind you this was done under continuous fire. Pretty fine, wasn’t it?’
A bugle call, a whistle, and the short breathing space is past.
Faces lean over the bulwarks, pink and boyish beside the thin and often haggard brown, hands are waved and with songs and cheers the old regiment, reinforced with its recruits, sways slowly and steams into the blue.
Were the whole history of the war ever to be written, were the myriad glorious deeds ever to be chronicled, would the world itself contain the books that should be written?