We laugh and throw him a tickey, and turn again to watch the skies—to-morrow, perhaps, the rains will come and we can plough and sow. For the dread hand that writes upon the wall has formed no fearful word for us—as yet—and sympathy, deep and very real as it is, stands in our lexicon as ‘a feeling for’ rather than ‘a feeling with.’
And then a cable calls me in haste to Durban to meet a returning transport and suddenly there is nothing in the world but war and its magnificence and its horror. The clusters of people at various stations who come to meet the mail train—the event of the day—the youths who slouch up and down the platform with loud voices and noisy jests, the girls who laugh with them, the groups of farmers talking of the crops—all these rouse me to a feeling of irritation, then to an impotent anger.
‘Come with me,’ I want to urge, ‘and I will take you where men are heroes in life and death.’ And again, ‘Is it nothing to you that your brothers agonise? Will you jest while the earth opens under your feet?’—and something ominous creeps into the meaningless laughter.
And then at last comes Durban, and I am surrounded with war activities and what was sinister has vanished in the wholesomeness of sacrifice and strenuous work.
To hundreds here war work has become their daily life. The town is always full of soldiers—Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans—coming and going. Here is a company of New Zealanders winding up the street. From a balcony I watch them marching with a fine swing—well set-up, stalwart fellows. Someone comes with a tray of cigarettes and we throw packets down amongst them, and their upturned, laughing boyish faces ask for more. Youngsters all of these, eager for happiness, eager for a slap at the Germans, and to ‘see life’—and their destination is the battlefield of Flanders! At the corner they dismiss and there is a race for the rickshaws; three crowd into one, and the Zulu boy gladly sweats up the incline and capers and leaps when the downward slope relieves him, knowing that for his brief exertion he will ask and get six times his lawful fee. His ostrich feathers wave, his black limbs flash, and the passengers lean back and laugh.
And the other side of the picture—a shipload of returning Australians, on crutches, arms in slings, helpless on wheeled chairs, with the look of the trenches on the brave faces that smile their grateful thanks. For to each and all Durban has a warm welcome. While they still lie off the Point, a girl signaller bids them come to the Y.M.C.A. Hut for all that they want, ladies from the Patriotic League wait on the wharf with supplies of cigarettes and fruit, motor-cars and carriages stop to pick up stragglers and carry them home to dinner, to a concert or theatre, and the Hut itself tempts with open doors to the comforts within, to the tables strewn with magazines and papers, to the letter-writing facilities and varied games, to the most excellent meals, where one penny will give a hungry man a liberal helping of cold meat or an appetising plate of fish mayonnaise, while a second penny provides the steaming cup.
Down on the Point a little crowd has gathered. The steamer is a day late, and wives and mothers sit and wait, or restlessly ply any and all with endless reiterate questions, or hold impatiently to a telephone receiver. And the night falls, and along the beach gardens the coloured lights hang in jewelled strings against the dark. A drizzle of rain makes a halo of their blurred radiance, the band plays, the few wanderers—the last of the holiday-makers—talk of their homeward journey, for the summer and the beginning of the season of rains are with us. Far out in the bay a mast-head light springs up, then more lights, a stir of excitement in the gathering crowd at the Point, and slowly the tug leads the transport to her moorings.
‘Stand back—stand back! Make way there!’ and with a whir of starting engines, the motor ambulances steer their way through the pressing crowd, and slowly the stretcher-bearers carry their freight along the lower deck and round the difficult angle of the lowered gangway. In silence this, and the greetings are very quiet as the waiting women meet their loved ones again—for this great steamer with her rows of decks and wide accommodation holds but the remnant of a regiment. Fifteen hundred strong they marched through Durban nine months ago, and how many have not returned! Fever, dysentery, debility, starvation, wounds and death—these have all taken their toll.
I suppose there are few parts of the world which nature has made more difficult to the intruder than German East Africa. In the forest the thorny creepers join tree to tree in close high walls until the very stars—man’s only guide—are hidden, nearly all the trees also are a-bristle with protecting spears, sharp as needles to pierce and tear the flesh, and to leave behind, it may be, a poisoned festering sore. Mountain ranges throw their boulders and tear their gaping chasms in the way, the streams, too few and far between for thirsty man, are torrents to be crossed on fallen logs, on slimy boulders where one sees the sudden agony flash in the eyes of a laden mule that slips, and with a struggle of frantic hoofs is tossed to death. A herd of elephants crashes like thunder through the scrub, trumpeting their suspicion of man’s presence, the lions prowling unheard startle with a sudden hungry roar and seek their meat from God.
Then come the swamps where the crocodile lies in the slime, and snakes coil, and the mosquito goes about its deadly work. Men sink to their waists in mud, the transports break down—all are tried in vain, ox waggons, mule carts, motor-cars, ‘and then we go hungry,’ said one man to me. Gaunt and weak, with eyes too bright for health, he smiled and spoke lightly—a least trembling of the hands, a twitch of a muscle, a look behind the smiling eyes which no laugh could quite conceal, these the only signs of the over-strained, still quivering nerves. He told me the story of how the flour supply ran out, of how the pangs of hunger were eased with the flesh of donkey or rhinoceros. For eight days the hungry men waited and watched and then a transport laden with sacks appeared—and the sacks held newspapers!