Was he tired? Everybody else was, so he supposed he must be.
Was he hungry? Yes—for the sight of a face. . . . Oh, the joy of shutting his eyes and calling it to memory’s eye, and of living over again every moment spent in her presence!
He realised, with something like amazement, that Love grows and waxes without the food and sustenance of the loved one’s real presence. He loved her more than he had done at Mombasa. Had he really loved her at Mombasa at all? Certainly not as he did now—when he thought of nothing else, and performed all his duties and functions mechanically and was only here present in the mere dull and unfeeling flesh. . . .
As the column halted where, across an open glade, the menacing sinister jungle might at any moment burst into crackling life, as machine-gun and rifle-fire crashed out to mow men down, he felt but mild interest, little curiosity and no vestige of fear. He would do his duty to the utmost, of course, but—how sweet to get a wound that would send him back to where she was!
As the column crossed the baked mud of former floods, and his eye noted the foot-prints, preserved in it, of elephant, lion, large and small antelope, rhinoceros and leopard, these wonders moved him to but faint interest, for he had something a thousand times more interesting to think of. Things that would have thrilled him before this great event, this greatest event, of his life—such as the first complete assembling of the Brigade in the first sufficient open space it had yet encountered—by the great spare rock, Njumba-ya-Mawe, the House of Stone, on which General Jan Smuts himself climbed to see them pass; the sight of his own Kashmiris cutting a way straight through the bush with their kukris; the glimpses of animals he had hitherto only seen in zoological gardens; the faint sound of far-distant explosions where the retiring Germans were blowing up their railway culverts and bridges; the sight of deserted German positions with their trenches littered with coco-nut shells, husks, and mealie-cobs, their cunning machine-gun positions, and their officers’ bandas littered with empty tins and bottles; the infernal hullabaloo when a lion got within the perimeter one night and stampeded the mules; the sudden meeting with a little band of ragged emaciated prisoners, some German patrol captured by the Pathan sowars of the 17th or the Mounted Infantry of the Lancashires; the passing, high in air, of a humming yellow aeroplane; the distant rattle of machine-guns, like the crackling of a forest fire, as the advance-guard came in sight of some retiring party of Kraut’s force; the hollow far-off boom of some big gun brought from the Konigsberg—dismantled and deserted in the Rufigi river—as it fired from Sams upon the frontal feint of the 2nd Brigade’s advance down the railway or at the column of King’s African Rifles from M’buyini—these things which would have so thrilled him once, now left him cold—mere trifles that impinged but lightly on his outer consciousness. . . .
“You’re a blasé old bloke, aren’t you, Greene?” said the puzzled Augustus. “Hardened old warrior like you can’t be expected to take much interest in a dull game like war, unless they let you charge guns and squares with cavalry, what? Sport without danger’s no good to you, what? You wait till you find a dam’ great Yao askari looking for your liver with a bayonet, my lad. . . . See you sit up and take notice then, what? Garn! You patient, grinning Griselda . . .” and so forth.
But, one evening, as the column approached the South Pare Mountains, near Mikocheni, Bertram “sat up and took notice,” very considerable notice, as with a rush and a roar and a terrific explosion, a column of black smoke and dust shot up to the sky when a shell burst a few score yards away—the first of a well-placed series of four-point-one high explosive shells.
The column halted and lay low in the bush. Further progress would be more wholesome in the dark.
“Naval guns: over seven miles away: dam’ good shootin’,” quoth Augustus coolly, and with the air of a connoisseur, adding, “and we’ve got nothing that could carry half-way to ’em. I’m goin’ ’ome. . . .”
Bertram, everything driven from his mind but the thought that he was under fire, was rejoiced to find himself as cool as Augustus, who suddenly remarked, “I’m not as ’appy as you look, and I don’t b’lieve you are either”—as the column hurriedly betook itself from the position-betraying dust of the open to the shelter of the scrub that lay between it and the river, the river so beautiful in the rose-glow and gold of evening, and so deadly to all who could not crawl beneath the sheltering mosquito curtains as the light faded from the sinister-lovely scene.