i came back to england at last when i was twenty-six. after the peace of vereeniging i worked under the repatriation commission which controlled the distribution of returning prisoners and concentrated population to their homes; for the most part i was distributing stock and grain, and presently manœuvring a sort of ploughing flying column that the dearth of horses and oxen made necessary, work that was certainly as hard as if far less exciting than war. that particular work of replanting the desolated country with human beings took hold of my imagination, and for a time at least seemed quite straightforward and understandable. the comfort of ceasing to destroy!
no one has written anything that really conveys the quality of that repatriation process; the queer business of bringing these suspicious, illiterate, despondent people back to their desolated homes, reuniting swarthy fathers and stockish mothers, witnessing their touchingly inexpressive encounters, doing what one could to put heart into their resumption. memories come back to me of great littered heaps of luggage, bundles, blankets, rough boxes, piled newly purchased stores, ready-made doors, window sashes heaped ready for the waggons, slow-moving, apathetic figures sitting and eating, an infernal squawking of parrots, sometimes a wailing of babies. repatriation went on to a parrot obligato, and i never hear a parrot squawk without a flash of south africa across my mind. all the prisoners, i believe, brought back parrots—some two or three. i had to spread these people out, over a country still grassless, with teams of war-worn oxen, mules and horses that died by the dozen on my hands. the end of each individual instance was a handshake, and one went lumbering on, leaving the children one had deposited behind one already playing with old ration-tins or hunting about for cartridge-cases, while adults stared at the work they had to do.
there was something elementary in all that redistribution. i felt at times like a child playing in a nursery and putting out its bricks and soldiers on the floor. there was a kind of greatness too about the process, a quality of atonement. and the people i was taking back, the men anyhow, were for the most part charming and wonderful people, very simple and emotional, so that once a big bearded man, when i wanted him in the face of an overflowing waggon to abandon about half-a-dozen great angular colored west indian shells he had lugged with him from bermuda, burst into tears of disappointment. i let him take them, and at the end i saw them placed with joy and reverence in a little parlor, to become the war heirlooms no doubt of a long and bearded family. as we shook hands after our parting coffee he glanced at them with something between gratitude and triumph in his eyes.
yes, that was a great work, more especially for a ripening youngster such as i was at that time. the memory of long rides and tramps over that limitless veld returns to me, lonely in spite of the creaking, lumbering waggons and transport riders and kaffirs that followed behind. south africa is a country not only of immense spaces but of an immense spaciousness. everything is far apart; even the grass blades are far apart. sometimes one crossed wide stony wastes, sometimes came great stretches of tall, yellow-green grass, wheel-high, sometimes a little green patch of returning cultivation drew nearer for an hour or so, sometimes the blundering, toilsome passage of a torrent interrupted our slow onward march. and constantly one saw long lines of torn and twisted barbed wire stretching away and away, and here and there one found archipelagoes as it were in this dry ocean of the skeletons of cattle, and there were places where troops had halted and their scattered ration-tins shone like diamonds in the sunshine. occasionally i struck talk, some returning prisoner, some group of discharged british soldiers become carpenters or bricklayers again and making their pound a day by the work of rebuilding; always everyone was ready to expatiate upon the situation. usually, however, i was alone, thinking over this immense now vanished tornado of a war and this equally astonishing work of healing that was following it.
i became keenly interested in all this great business, and thought at first of remaining indefinitely in africa. repatriation was presently done and finished. i had won milner's good opinion, and he was anxious for me to go on working in relation to the labor difficulty that rose now more and more into prominence behind the agricultural re-settlement. but when i faced that i found myself in the middle of a tangle infinitely less simple than putting back an agricultural population upon its land.
