“Dunno,” yawned Hall. “Better ask the Colonel. What’s the matter with bed at four ack emma? That’s where I’d be if I weren’t in orders for this silly show.”
As Bertram left the tent on his tour of exploration he decided that he would ask the Colonel if he might go with the expedition, and then he decided that he would do nothing so utterly foolish. . . . No, of course he wouldn’t. . . .
Yes, he would. . . .
CHAPTER XI
Food and Feeders
Rightly or wrongly, Bertram gathered the impression, as he strolled about the Camp, that this was not a confident and high-spirited army, drunk with the heady fumes of a debauch of victory. The demeanour of the Indian Sepoys led him to the conclusion, just or unjust, that they had “got their tails down.” They appeared weary, apprehensive, even despondent, when not merely apathetic, and seemed to him to be distinctly what they themselves would call mugra—pessimistic and depressed.
The place alone was sufficient to depress anybody, he freely admitted, as he gazed around at the dreary grey environs of this little British pied-à-terre—grey thorn bush; grey grass; grey baobab trees (like hideous grey carrots with whiskerish roots, pulled up from the ground and stood on end); grey shell-strewn mud; grey bushwood; grey mangroves; grey sky. Yes, an inimical minatory landscape; a brooding, unwholesome, sinister landscape; the home of fever, dysentery, disease and sudden death. And over all hung a horrible sickening stench of decay, an evil smell that seemed to settle at the pit of the stomach as a heavy weight.
No wonder if Indians from the hills, deserts, plains and towns of the Deccan, the Punjab, Rajputana, and Nepal, found this terrible place of most terrific heat, foul odour, bad water and worse mud, enervating and depressing. . . . Poor beggars—it wasn’t their war either. . . . The faces of the negroes of the King’s African Rifles were inscrutable, and, being entirely ignorant of their ways, manners, and customs, he could not tell whether they were exhibiting signs of discouragement and depression, or whether their bearing and demeanour were entirely normal. Certainly they seemed a stolid and reserved folk, with a kind of dignity and self-respecting aloofness that he had somehow not expected. In their tall tarbooshes, jerseys, shorts and puttees, they looked most workman-like and competent soldiers. . . . Certainly they did not tally with his preconceived idea of them as a merry, care-free, irresponsible folk who grinned all over their faces for sheer light-heartedness, and spent their leisure time in twanging the banjo, clacking the bones, singing rag-time songs and doing the cake-walk. On duty, they stood like ebon statues and opened not their mouths. Off duty they squatted like ebon statuettes and shut them. Perhaps they did not know that England expects every nigger to do his duty as a sort of born music-hall, musical minstrel—or perhaps they were depressed, like the Sepoys, and had laid aside their banjoes, bones, coon-songs and double-shuffle-flap-dancing boots until brighter days? . . . Anyhow, decided Bertram, he would much rather be with these stalwarts than against them, when they charged with their triangular bayonets on their Martini rifles; and if the German askaris were of similar type, he cared not how long his first personal encounter with them might be postponed. . . . Nor did the Englishmen of the Army Service Corps, the Royal Engineers, the Signallers and other details, strike him as light-hearted and bubbling with the joie de vivre. Frankly they looked ill, and they looked anxious. . . .
Strolling past the brushwood-and-grass hut which was the R.A.M.C. Officers’ Mess, he heard the remark:
“They’ve only got to leave us here in peace a little while for us all to die natural deaths of malaria or dysentery. The wily Hun knows that all right. . . . No fear—we shan’t be attacked here. No such luck.”
“Not unless we make ourselves too much of a nuisance to him,” said another voice. “’Course, if we go barging about and capturing his trading posts and ‘factories,’ and raiding his shambas, he’ll come down on us all right. . . .”