It isn't my business to write here any story of my war experiences. Luck and some latent quality in my composition made me a fairly successful soldier. Among other things I have an exceptionally good sense of direction, and that was very useful to me, and in Burnmore Park I suppose I had picked up many of the qualities of a . I did some fair outpost work during the Ladysmith siege, I could report as well as crawl and watch, and I was already a when we made a night attack and captured and blew up Long Tom. There, after the fight, while we were covering the engineers, I got a queer steel ball about the size of a pea in my arm, a bicycle bearings ball it was, and had my first experience of an army surgeon's knife next day. It was much less painful than I had expected. I was also hit during the big assault on the sixth of January in the left shoulder, but so very slightly that I wasn't disabled. They were the only wounds I got in the war, but I went under with dysentery before the relief; and though I was by no means a bad case I was a very yellow-faced, broken-looking convalescent when at last the Boer hosts rolled again and Buller's men came riding across the flats....
I had seen some things during those four months of actual , a hundred intense impressions of death, wounds, anger, patience, , courage, and destruction—above all, wasteful destruction—to correct the easy optimistic of my university days. There is a depression in the opening stages of fever and a feebleness in a on a starvation diet that leads men to broad and sober views. (Heavens! how I hated the horse extract—'chevril' we called it—that served us for beef tea.) When I came down from Ladysmith to the sea to pick up my strength I had not an illusion left about the , divinely appointed empire of the English. But if I had less national , I had certainly more determination. That grew with every day of returning health. The reality of this war had got hold of my imagination, as indeed for a time it got hold of the English imagination altogether, and I was now almost fiercely keen to learn and do. At the first chance I returned to active service, and now I was no longer a lover taking war for a cure, but an earnest, and I think reasonably able, young officer, very alert for chances.
I got those chances soon enough. I rejoined our men beyond Kimberley, on the way to Mafeking,—we were the extreme British left in the advance upon Pretoria—and I rode with Mahon and was with him in a little affair beyond Koodoosrand. It was a sudden brisk encounter. We got fired into at close quarters, but we knew our work by that time, and charged home and brought in a handful of prisoners to make up for the men we had lost. A few days later we came into the ruins of the siege in history....
Three days after we relieved Mafeking I had the luck to catch one of Snyman's retreating guns rather easily, the only big gun that was taken at Mafeking. I came upon it unexpectedly with about twenty men, a of brush four hundred yards ahead, into it before the Boers realized the boldness of our game, shot all the oxen while they hesitated, and held them up until arrived on the scene. The incident got perhaps a disproportionate share of attention in the papers at home, because of the way in which Mafeking had been kept in focus. I was mentioned twice again in despatches before we rode across to join Roberts in Pretoria and see what we believed to be the end of the war. We were too late to go on up to Komatipoort, and had some rather blank and troublesome work on the north side of the town. That was indeed the end of the great war; the rest was a struggle with guerillas.
Everyone thought things were altogether over. I wrote to my father discussing the probable date of my return. But there were great chances still to come for an active young officer; the guerilla war was to prolong the struggle yet for a whole , eventful year, and I was to make the most of those later opportunities....
Those years in South Africa are stuck into my mind like—like those pink colored pages about something else one finds at times in a railway Indicateur. Chance had put this work in my way, and started me upon it with a reputation that wasn't altogether deserved, and I found I could only live up to it and get things done well by a and extreme concentration of my attention. But the whole business was so interesting that I found it possible to make that concentration. warfare is a game of elaborate but problems in precaution and , with amazing scope for invention. You so your mind with the facts and possibilities of the situation that intuitions emerge. It did not do to think of anything beyond those facts and possibilities and and counterdodges, for to do so was to let in and distracting lights. During all that concluding year of service I was not so much myself as a forced and artificial thing I made out of myself to meet the special needs of the time. I became a Boer-outwitting animal. When I was tired of this thinking, then the best relief, I found, was some quite trivial occupation—playing , yelling in the chorus of some interminable song one of the men would sing, or coining South African Limericks or playing bouts-rimés with Fred , who was then my second in command....
Yet occasionally thought overtook me. I remember lying one night out upon a huge dark hillside, in a of rock-ribbed hills, waiting for one of the flying commandoes that were breaking northward from Colony towards the Orange River in front of Colonel Eustace. We had been riding all day, I was taking risks in what I was doing, and there is something very cheerless in a fireless bivouac. My mind became uncontrollably active.
It was a clear, still night. The young moon set early in a glow of white that threw the jagged contours of a hill to the south-east into strange, . The patches of moonshine evaporated from the summits of the nearer hills, and left them hard and dark. Then there was nothing but a great soft black darkness below that jagged edge and above it the stars very large and bright. Somewhere under that enormous to the south of us the hunted Boers must be halting to snatch an hour or so of rest, and beyond them again extended the long thin net of the pursuing British. It all seemed small and remote, there was no sound of it, no hint of it, no searchlight at work, no faintest streamer of smoke nor the reflection of a fire in the sky....
All this business that had held my mind so long was reduced to between the blackness of the hills and the greatness of the sky; a little trouble, it seemed of no importance under the Southern Cross. And I fell wondering, as I had not wondered for long, at the forces that had brought me to this occupation and the strangeness of this game of war which had filled the minds and tempered the spirit of a quarter of a million of men for two hard-living years.
I fell thinking of the dead.
No soldier in a proper state of mind ever thinks of the dead. At times of course one suspects, one catches a man glancing at the pair of boots sticking out stiffly from under a blanket, but at once he speaks of other things. Nevertheless some suppressed part of my being had been stirring up ugly and memories, of distortion, disfigurement, and decay, of dead men in stained and clothes, with their sole-worn boots up under them, of the blood trail of a dying man who had crawled up to a dead comrade rather than die alone, of Kaffirs heaping limp, pitiful bodies together for burial, of the voices of wounded in the rain on Hill crying in the ni............