It was during the season that followed, when, as a correspondent of an English paper neatly put it, we "held the railway and shouted for help," that we realized the real, inner meaning of monotony. At first we expected to get going in a week, then we put the time forward to months, and finally we resigned ourselves. To live in standing camp for the rest of our natural lives, to do long patrol, short patrol, and "bait" patrol for ever and ever seemed the best we could hope of life. Letters arrived with some regularity, for we were then only some few miles over the border. Papers drifted through to us, and we knew more of the happenings in Europe than we did of our own campaign, though occasionally we gleaned some items of local interest from the English papers. It annoyed us to see an alleged illustration of one of our "scraps," in which smart-looking men on ramping horses were represented as fighting in open country at five hundred yards, whilst in reality it was done by untidy men on mules, in thick bush, at forty yards. The real thing was much better than the artist's conception of it.
There are, as I have implied, three kinds of patrol—the long patrol, on which you spend many days scouring the burning veldt for Germans, and hoping you won't find them; the short patrol, on which you spend one day doing the same thing; and the "bait" patrol, on which you spend the cold and cheerless hours before dawn wandering round the camp and hoping the Germans won't find you. On the latter it is the earnest desire of your King and country that the noise of your getting shot will alarm the camp before the attack takes place. If, on these occasions, you meet a lion, or any vermin of that kind, you must allow him to bash you on the head and dine off your limbs rather than raise a false alarm. One of our fellows met a lioness with cubs on one of these cheery rambles, and was only saved by the fact that he and his mule both froze stiff with terror, and baffled her by not running away. He moved off slowly at last, and she followed the patrol till dawn, obviously puzzled by these strange beings.
Of long patrol your first intimation of the joy in store for you usually is an excited clucking of the telephone buzzer at 2 a. m. on a particularly joyless morning. "Kaar-kuk-kuk! Kaar-kuk-kuk!" it observes, exactly like a hen that has laid an egg. Of course, the obvious thing to do is to fling a boot at the 'phone and go to sleep; but we signallers have a strong sense of duty, so we call the adjutant, who takes a mean revenge by telling us to be saddled up in fifteen minutes and go out for ten days to some "ticky" and waterless part of Africa which is, according to the 'phone, swarming with Germans.
The next ten minutes is spent in feverishly collecting gear, with which you stagger through the night to your disgusted steed, who, when he has realized what is in store for him, behaves as though he had never seen you, nor your saddle, nor the helio stand, nor anything that is yours in his life before, this being his habit in all moments of emergency. Then you take a few frantic tugs at your cigarette before the "No smoking" order is passed down, and ride out into the unknown.
IV—NIGHT RIDES OVER THE VELDT
Those night rides over the veldt were all alike. Your vision was limited to the man in front of you, who was a blurred shape that you, in a half-dream, were always chasing and never coming up with. It was a dream that seemed to go on for years and years, and then your mule would stumble and bring you to your senses with a jerk. In that light—for it is never very dark in Africa—men appear as trees, and thorn bushes dismount and take aim at you.
Dawn would find the whole patrol riding with eyes glued to the horizon and lips closed on unlit cigarettes. The order regarding smoking on those night-marches is strict. Once when we were escorting a captured German patrol, one of our men thoughtlessly lit up. One of the prisoners promptly leaned over and said, in English: "You mustn't do that; the enemy will see us."
The scenery was always the same there—rolling stretches of sun-browned veldt, kopje upon kopje, wonderfully shadowed, patches of thornscrub, and, clothing the banks of rivers and streams, strips of forest; the climate cold by night and hot by day. Africa is a queer, baffling, changeable country. Exactly the same scene can take on absolutely different aspects at different hours in the day. The thorn-tree flowers into a white brush with a sweet smell, and in the early morning, with a whitish haze hanging over and a cool wind blowing, the country seems beautiful and the trees appear as though laden with apple blossoms. Yet, in the hard, hot light of midday, with inky shadows outlined and the dust settling on the trees, the same place is ugly and repellent. On these patrols we moved by night, and failed to sleep by day, because the patch of shade that will remain shaded for even a few hours is non-existent. I usually woke to find my body too hot to touch and my water-bottle on the boil.
Later, when the South African forces came over and we got going, we had easier times, could travel by day, and lost that feeling of being little veldt-mice creeping out of our holes.
Once patrol was over and we were "home" in camp, we led a curious life, half soldier, half country gentleman. We lived in roomy bandas, or grass huts, a section in each, and as nearly every trooper had a "boy," or native servant, our meals were brought to the banda, and we clubbed together for luxuries. Also, we picked up our own sections, so that if four pals elected to go through the war together, they got the O. C. to fix it up.