“Oah! That was calomel!” replied the worthy doctor, and Augustus arose forthwith and retired, murmuring: “Poignant! Searching!”
He had once taken a quarter of a grain of calomel, and it had tied him in knots.
When Bertram visited Murie, Lindsay and Augustus in their respective huts, Augustus seemed the worst of the three. With white face, set teeth, and closed eyes, he lay bunched up, and, from time to time, groaned, “Oh, poignant! Searching! . . .”
It being impossible for him to march, it fell to Bertram to take his duty that day, and lead an officers’ patrol to reconnoitre a distant village to which, according to information received by the Intelligence Department, a German patrol had just paid a visit. For some reason the place had been sacked and burnt.
It was Bertram’s business to discover whether there were any signs of a boma having been established by this patrol; to learn anything he could about its movements; whence it had come and whither it had gone; whether the massacre were a punishment for some offence, or just the result of high animal (German) spirits; whether there were many shambas, of no further use to slaughtered people, in which the raiders had left any limes, bananas, papai or other fruits, vegetables, or crops; whether any odd chicken or goat had been overlooked, and was wanting a good home; and, in short, to find out anything that could be found out, see all that was to be seen, do anything that might be done. . . . As he marched out of the Fort at the head of a hundred Gurkhas, with a local guide and interpreter, he felt proud and happy, quite reckless, and absolutely indifferent to his fate. He would do his best in any emergency that might arise, and he could do no more. He’d leave it at that.
He’d march straight ahead with a “point” in front of him, and if he was ambushed, he was ambushed.
When they reached the village, he’d deploy into line and send scouts into the place. If he was shot dead—a jolly good job. If he were wounded and left lying for the German askaris to find—or the wild beasts at night . . . he turned from the thought.
Anyhow, he’d got good cheery, sturdy Gurkhas with him, and it was a pleasure and an honour to serve with them.
One jungle march is precisely like another—and in three or four hours the little column reached the village, deployed, and skirmished into it, to find it a deserted, burnt-out ruin. Kultur had passed that way, leaving its inevitable and unmistakable sign-manual. The houses were only blackened skeletons; the gardens, wildernesses; the byres, cinder-heaps; the fruit-trees, withering wreckage. What had been pools of blood lay here and there, with clumps of feathers, burnt and broken utensils, remains of slaughtered domestic animals and chickens.
Kultur had indeed passed that way. To Bertram it seemed, in a manner, sadder that this poor barbarous little African village should be so treated than that a walled city of supermen should suffer. . . “Is there not more cruelty and villainy in violently robbing a crying child of its twopence than in snatching his gold watch from a portly stockbroker?” thought he, as he gazed around on the scene of ruin, desolation and destruction.