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 on the part of the home military authorities which arose later, to send out young . I could ride and shoot fairly well, and accordingly I to go on my own account to Durban—for it was manifest that things would begin in —and there attach myself to some of the local volunteer 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 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 from steam tenders with wealthy refugees going England-ward. From two troopships against the 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 rickshaw Zulu to a 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 of men, mostly Australian volunteers, on my way to a place I had never heard of before called Ladysmith, through a country of increasing and along a curious curving little line whose down traffic seemed always waiting in sidings, and consisted of crowded little trains full of pitiful , white, brown, and black, 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 train that sent everyone on to the line to see—prisoners of war! There they were, real live enemies, rather , 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 <............