“Why?” said Copper. “I’m smokin’ baccy stole by a renegid. Why wouldn’t I know?”
If it came to a flogging on that hillside there might be a chance of reprisals. Of course, he might be marched to the Boer camp in the next valley and there operated upon; but Army life teaches no man to cross bridges unnecessarily.
“Yes, after eight years, my father, cheated by your bitch of a country, he found out who was the upper dog in South Africa.”
“That’s me,” said Copper valiantly. “If it takes another ’alf century, it’s me an’ the likes of me.”
“You? Heaven help you! You’ll be screaming at a wagon-wheel in an hour…. Then it struck my father that he’d like to shoot the people who’d betrayed him. You—you—you! He told his son all about it. He told him never to trust the English. He told him to do them all the harm he could. Mann, I tell you, I don’t want much telling. I was born in the Transvaal—I’m a burgher. If my father didn’t love the English, by the Lord, mann, I tell you, I hate them from the bottom of my soul.”
The voice quavered and ran high. Once more, for no conceivable reason, Private Copper found his inward eye turned upon Umballa cantonments of a dry dusty afternoon, when the saddle-coloured son of a local hotel-keeper came to the barracks to complain of a theft of fowls. He saw the dark face, the plover’s-egg-tinted eyeballs, and the thin excited hands. Above all, he remembered the passionate, queerly-strung words. Slowly he returned to South Africa, using the very sentence his sergeant had used to the poultry man.
“Go on with your complaint. I’m listenin’.”
“Complaint! Complaint about you, you ox! We strip and kick your sort by thousands.”
The young man rocked to and fro above the rifle, whose muzzle thus deflected itself from the pit of Private Copper’s stomach. His face was dusky with rage.
“Yess, I’m a Transvaal burgher. It took us about twenty years to find out how rotten you were. We know and you know it now. Your army—it is the laughing-stock of the Continent.” He tapped the newspaper in his pocket. “You think you’re going to win, you poor fools. Your people—your own people—your silly rotten fools of people will crawl out of it as they did after Majuba. They are beginning now. Look what your own working classes, the diseased, lying, drinking white stuff that you come out of, are saying.” He thrust the English weekly, doubled at the leading article, on Copper’s knee. “See what dirty dogs your masters are. They do not even back you in your dirty work. We cleared the country down to Ladysmith—to Estcourt. We cleared the country down to Colesberg.”