Mules are utter hypocrites. There is no animal living that can assume an expression of such injured innocence as a mule when he has "done you down" properly. When, at the end of the first round of that exciting bout miscalled "stables," you abandon currycomb and brush and pause to consider the possibilities of the situation, your mount gazes at you more in sorrow than in anger, suggesting that he is the stranger in a pest-ridden country, and that he merely acted in self-defence. Of course, grooming is a painful process for both parties, for unless the beasts have been well sprayed with disinfectant beforehand, the clustered fauna of Africa display a desperate tenacity. The insect pests were, by the way, one of the chief features of the East African campaign; after patrol we used to feel as if we wanted spraying ourselves.
Pack-mules provide some exacting moments when you are moving camp in a hurry. On our forced march into Aruscha—a matter of some seventy-five miles, with short intervals for food and sleep—the dawn of one day found us enticing some of the dear things over plank bridges laid across a ravine. There was a nightmare suggestion about the scene that only Sime could have done justice to; for it was still too dark to see to the bottom of the ravine, and the swaying bridges seemed to stretch into eternity.
Our first camp was in a bit of the Southern Game Reserve—a lovely place. The signallers were perched on a rocky peak, surrounded by clumps of low hills, which merged into stretches of plain, covered with thorn scrub. After rain the hills used to turn to a heavenly blue, with shifting lights of mauve and purple as the cloud shadows slid over them, and we could see Meru, which we then looked upon as the first place we had to take, a jagged and formidable peak; and, sometimes, when the air was very clear, Kilimanjaro appeared like a big, flat-topped cake with powdered sugar dusted over it.
III—FIGHTING WITH LIONS AND RHINO IN JUNGLE LAND
At night a chill wind whooped down the valleys, and we were smothered in swirls of damp mist. Lions roared nightly, and it was possible to stumble on a sleeping rhino at any time of the day. They used to charge patrols and disorganize them, and one of our fellows who had strayed away from his troop met one face to face. His mule streaked one way, he another, and the rhino nearly broke his back in vamoosing in a third direction. The trooper was lucky to have found the beast in a timid mood, for the rhino's only amusement lies in chasing unoffending sons of empire through thick thorn scrub, though he's usually in too bad a temper to realize what fun it is.
There is something peculiarly terrifying about a rhino charge in the camp at night. You awake and jump to safety all in a moment, impelled by the nightmare terror that belongs to the time when fear ruled the world, and the rash ancestor who slept on the ground made a spring for the nearest branch on the approach of some primeval monster.
We all have our affectations, and that of the old hand was indifference to the game peril.
"You mustn't believe all the wild beasts stories you hear," he would observe to the tenderfoot. "They are mostly frightful exaggerations." Then the nervous one would look up and observe a rhino gazing morosely at these intruders on the privacy of his own special tract of forest. The next moment the tenderfoot would be in the arms of a peculiarly inhospitable tree, wondering what was going to happen next. Certainly life in what the kinema posters call "Nature's Zoo" holds excitements of a kind unknown to the army in any other quarter of the globe. I used to think out problems unprovided for by the Hague Convention, such as, if a small British patrol met a small enemy patrol in thick bush, and at the same time flushed an angry rhino, what would be the correct procedure? Should the combatants combine to blot out the rhino, and then proceed with their own quarrel, or should they hurriedly retire and fight somewhere else? I never heard of any such contingency arising, but it easily might have done so, and it is certain that once, just as one of our patrols sighted a German patrol, a rhino charged our rear, and two of our men had to fall out to tackle it, whilst the rest fired on the Germans.
Our first engagement was at Longido, in the first November of the war.
Our regiment had a tough day, and lay for many hours under fire without food or water, but I am not out to write the story of that skirmish. It doesn't come under the heading of the humors of the campaign, although there was a certain grim humor knocking about all the same. Our men were so new to that sort of thing that it took them some time to realize they were under heavy fire, and just when the firing was hottest one of them was waving a toothbrush and asking, "Any of you chaps lost a toothbrush?" whilst another shouted, "Come over here, you fellows. Lovely shooting!"