Over the Major’s face stole a similar expression. He looked as one who has received sudden, interesting and important but anxious news.
“Thank you,” said he. “I’ll—ah—go round. Yes. Come with me, will you? . . .” Cecil Clarence again saluted, and fell in behind the Major as he left the banda. Bertram followed. The Major went to his tent and put on his tunic and cross-belt. These did little to improve the unfastenable riding-breeches, bare calves and grey socks, but were evidently part of the rite.
Proceeding thence to the entrance to the boma, the Major squeezed through, was saluted by the guard, and there met by an English officer in the dress of the small men whom Bertram had noticed on his arrival. His white face looked incongruous with the blue turban and tartan petticoat. “All present and correct, sir,” said he. Half his men were down in the trench, their rifles resting in the loop-holes of the parapet. These loop-holes were of wicker-work, like bottomless waste-paper baskets, and were built into the earthwork of the parapet so that a man, looking through one, had a foot of earth and logs above his head. The other half of his blue-clad force was inside the boma and lining the wall. This wall, some eight feet in height, had been built by erecting two walls of stout wattle and posts, two feet apart, and then filling the space between these two with earth. Along the bottom of the wall ran a continuous fire-step, some two feet in height, and a line of wicker-work loop-holes pierced it near the top. In the angle, where this side of the boma met the other, was a tower of posts, wattle and earth, some twelve feet in height, and on it, within an earth-and-wattle wall, and beneath a thatched roof, was a machine-gun and its team of King’s African Rifles askaris, in charge of an English N.C.O. On the roof squatted a sentry, who stared at the sky with a look of rapt attention to duty.
“How are those two men, Black?” asked the Major, as the N.C.O. saluted.
“Very bad, sir,” was the reply. “They’ll die to-night. I’m quite sure the Germans had poisoned that honey and left it for our askari patrols to find. I wondered at the time that they ’adn’t skoffed it themselves. . . . And it so near their boma and plain to see, an’ all. . . . I never thought about poison till it was too late. . . .”
“Foul swine!” said the Major. “I suppose it’s a trick they learnt from the shenzis, this poisoning wild honey? . . .”
“More like they taught it ’em, sir,” was the reply. “There ain’t no savage as low as a German, sir. . . . I lived in German East, I did, afore the war. . . . I know ’em. . . .”
The next face of the boma was held by the Hundred and Ninety-Eighth. Captain Macke met the Major and saluted him as a revered stranger. He, too, wore tunic and cross-belt and a look of portentous solemnity, such as that on the faces of the Major, Cecil Clarence, and, indeed, everybody else. Bertram, later, labelled it the Stand-to face and practised to acquire it.
“How many sick, Captain Macke?” enquired the Major.
“Twenty-seven, sir,” was the reply. Bertram wondered whether they were “present” in the spirit and “correct” in form.