mary and i did not meet again for five years, and for nearly all that time i remained in south africa. i went from england a boy; i came back seasoned into manhood. they had been years of crowded experience, rapid yet complicated growth, disillusionment and thought. responsibility had come to me. i had seen death, i had seen suffering, and held the lives of men in my hands.
of course one does not become a soldier on active service at once for the wishing, and there was not at first that ready disposition on the part of the home military authorities which arose later, to send out young enthusiasts. i could ride and shoot fairly well, and accordingly i decided to go on my own account to durban—for it was manifest that things would begin in natal—and there attach myself to some of the local volunteer corps that would certainly be raised. this took me out of england at once, a thing that fell in very well with my mood. i would, i was resolved, begin life afresh. i would force myself to think of nothing but the war. i would never if i could help it think of mary again.
the war had already begun when i reached durban. the town was seething with the news of a great british victory at dundee. we came into the port through rain and rough weather and passed a big white liner loaded up feverishly from steam tenders with wealthy refugees going england-ward. from two troopships against the wharves there was a great business of landing horses—the horses of the dragoons and hussars from india. i spent the best part of my first night in south africa in the streets looking in vain for a bedroom, and was helped at last by a kindly rickshaw zulu to a shanty where i slept upon three chairs. i remember i felt singularly unwanted.
the next day i set about my volunteering. by midday i had opened communications with that extremely untried and problematical body, the imperial light horse, and in three days more i was in the company of a mixed batch of men, mostly australian volunteers, on my way to a place i had never heard of before called ladysmith, through a country of increasing picturesqueness and along a curious curving little line whose down traffic seemed always waiting in sidings, and consisted of crowded little trains full of pitiful fugitives, white, brown, and black, stifled and starving. they were all clamoring to buy food and drink—and none seemed forthcoming. we shunted once to allow a southbound train to pass, a peculiar train that sent everyone on to the line to see—prisoners of war! there they were, real live enemies, rather glum, looking out at us with faces very like our own—but rather more unshaven. they had come from the battle of elandslaagte....
i had never been out of england before except for a little mountaineering in the french alps and one walking excursion in the black forest, and the scenery of lower natal amazed me. i had expected nothing nearly so tropical, so rich and vivid. there were little mozambique monkeys chattering in the thick-set trees beside the line and a quantity of unfamiliar birds and gaudy flowers amidst the abundant deep greenery. there were aloe and cactus hedges, patches of unfamiliar cultivation upon the hills; bunchy, frondy growths that i learnt were bananas and plantains, and there were barbaric insanitary-looking kaffir kraals which i supposed had vanished before our civilization. there seemed an enormous quantity of kaffirs all along the line—and all of them, men, women, and children, were staring at the train. the scenery grew finer and bolder, and more bare and mountainous, until at last we came out into the great basin in which lay this ladysmith. it seemed a poor unimportant, dusty little street of huts as we approached it, but the great crests beyond struck me as very beautiful in the morning light....
i forgot the beauty of those hills as we drew into the station. it was the morning after the surrender of nicholson's nek. i had come to join an army already tremendously astonished and shattered. the sunny prospect of a triumphal procession to pretoria which had been still in men's minds at durban had vanished altogether. in rather less than a fortnight of stubborn fighting we had displayed a strategy that was flighty rather than brilliant, and lost a whole battery of guns and nearly twelve hundred prisoners. we had had compensations, our common soldiers were good stuff at any rate, but the fact was clear that we were fighting an army not only very much bigger than ours but better equipped, with bigger guns, better information, and it seemed superior strategy. we were being shoved back into this ladysmith and encircled. this confused, disconcerted, and thoroughly bad-tempered army, whose mules and bullocks cumbered the central street of the place, was all that was left of the british empire in natal. behind it was an unprotected country and the line to pietermaritzburg, durban, and the sea.
you cannot imagine how amazed i felt at it. i had been prepared for a sort of kentucky quality in the enemy, illiteracy, pluck, guile and good shooting, but to find them with more modern arms than our own, more modern methods! weren't we there, after all, to teach them! weren't we the twentieth and they the eighteenth century? the town had been shelled the day before from those very hills i had admired; at any time it might be shelled again. the nose of a big gun was pointed out to me by a blasphemous little private in the devons. it was a tremendous, a profoundly impressive, black snout. his opinions of the directing wisdom at home were unquotable. the platform was a wild confusion of women and children and colored people,—there was even an invalid lady on a stretcher. every non-combatant who could be got out of ladysmith was being hustled out that day. everyone was smarting with the sense of defeat in progress, everyone was disappointed and worried; one got short answers to one's questions. for a time i couldn't even find out where i had to go....
