The enemy, of course, often see me, but are luckily very suspicious, and look upon me as a bait to some trap, and are therefore slow to come at me. They often shout to me; and yesterday my boy, who was with my horse, told me they were calling to each other that “Impeesa” was there—i.e. “the Wolf,” or, as he translated it, “the beast that does not sleep, but sneaks about at night.”
“Impeesa”—“the beast that does not sleep, but sneaks about at night.”
Marking the Matabele camp–fires in the Matopos.
14th July.—Last night I was riding alone across the veldt; I came suddenly upon a Matabele driving a horse and a mule towards the Matopos. He turned and fled, and I galloped after him to give him a fright, and then returned to the beasts, which I drove before me safely to camp. They were our own branded animals, which had been looted.
On getting back to Buluwayo at 9.30 p. m., after having been away for some days’ solitary scouting, varied by such patrols as that described in the last chapter, I found that reports had come in from the officer commanding Fig Tree Fort, saying that rebel impis were on the move there. Ferguson had at once been sent off by the General, with 50 men of the newly–formed police, and Laing’s column of about 150, which had lately come in from the Belingwe District. No sooner had the troops got there (on the 13th) than they found that the Matabele impis were merely pictures in the mind’s eye of the commandant, a Dutchman, who had been imbibing not wisely, but too well.
15th July.—“Well! of all the murkiest rot that ever I heard of, this is the murkiest!” These words, and others to the same effect, but, to use the speaker’s term, “murkier,” saluted my waking senses at an unseemly hour of this morning. For a moment I was inclined to reach for my gun, or, at all events, to let fly my feelings at the two loafers who stood yarning at my window–sill (we live on the ground floor in Buluwayo, because there is not a second to our house, nor, indeed, to any house in the place except “Williams’ Buildings,” and they are “buildings” being not yet built); but presently a lazy feeling of curiosity got the better of my momentary irritation, and I played the eavesdropper. It was merely a discussion of the situation between two late troopers of the Buluwayo Field Force, dealing more particularly with the “Proclamation to the Rebels,” which had been issued last night. Their review of it was remarkable, not only for the vigour, and—well—the originality of their language, but also because it covered exactly the ground over which all travelled again when they came to discuss it with me, or in my hearing, during the remainder of the day. One thing that struck them all was that this proclamation of clemency which was now to be published to the rebels was made in England and not in Rhodesia, and that “it was made by people who had no more conception of how things were in this part of the world than a boiled dumpling had of horse–racing”; at least, that was what they inferred from the tenor of its wording. I do not say that they had read and inwardly digested the exact literal meaning of the wording. I think, on the contrary, that they had only grasped a general idea of it all; the very heading of a “Proclamation of Clemency” at such a juncture having filled their thoughts with rage, and left them to read the rest with biassed minds.
Unfortunately for the proclamation, within a few hours of its publication there came from Mashonaland another of the horrid telegrams with which we are only too familiar now. After telling of three different murders of friendly natives by rebels on the previous day, it went on to say: “The wife and two daughters of Mobele, the native missionary, reached Salisbury from Marendellas this morning. They related how the missionary was killed by rebels while he was endeavouring to save the life of James White, who was lying wounded. White was also killed. Then three little children of the missionary were killed. And the women themselves were maltreated and left for dead. They did not know their way to Salisbury, so followed the telegraph line, and travelled by night only, suffering great privations.”