“See,Bwana,” replied Ali, pointing to a small branch that lay in the middle of the path, with its broken end towards them and its leaves away from them. “Road closed. I ’specaskaripatrol from Butani putting it there, when they knowBwanacoming, thank God, please.”
Apparently this twig, to the experienced eye, was preciselyequivalent to a notice-board bearing the legend,No Thoroughfare. Bertram signalled a halt and turned to the Havildar at the head of the advance-guard.
“Take ten men and patrol down that path for a thousand yards,” said he. “Then march back, wait for the rear-guard, and report to the Jemadar Sahib.”
The man saluted, and Bertram saw him and his patrol move off, before he gave the order for the column to advance again. . . . That should secure thesafarifrom attack downthatpath, anyhow. Ten determined men could hold up any number for any length of time, if they did the right thing. . . . These beastly bush fighting conditions cut both ways. . . . Yes—then suppose a small patrol of enemyaskariswere on this track in front of him, and decided to hold the convoy up, what could he do?
To advance upon them, practically in single file, would be like approaching a long stick of sealing-wax to the door of a furnace—the point would melt and melt until the whole stick had disappeared without reaching the fire. . . . Of course, if there was a possibility of getting into the jungle, he would send out parties to take them in flank as he charged down the path. But that was just the point—youcouldn’tget more than a few yards into the jungle in the likeliest places, and, when you’d done that, you’d be utterly out of touch with your right and left-hand man in no time—not to mention the fact that you’d have no sense of direction or distance. . . .
No. . . . He’d just head a charge straight for them, and if it were a really determined one and the distance not too great, enough of the advance-guard might survive to reach them with the bayonet. . . . Evidently, if there were any rules at all in this jungle warfare, one would be that the smaller of the two forces should dispose itself to bring every rifle to bear with magazine fire, and the larger should make the swiftest charge it possibly could. If it didn’t—a dozen men would be as good as a thousand—while their ammunition held out. . . . What an advantage over the Indian Sepoy, with his open ordermaidan[150]training, theaskari, bred and born and trained to this bush-fighting, would have! The Germanoughtto win this campaign with his very big army of indigenous soldiers and his “salted” Colonials. What chance had the Sepoy or the British Regular in these utterlystrange and unthought-of conditions? . . . As well train aviators and then put them in submarines as train the Indian Army for the frontier and the plains and then put them in these swamps and jungles where your enemy is invisible and your sole “formation” is single file. What about the sacred and Medean Law:Never fire until you can see something to fire at? They’d never fire at all, at that rate, with an enemy who habitually used machine-guns from tree-tops and fired from dense cover—and small blame to him. . . .
A sound of rushing water, and a few minutes later the path became the edge of a river-bank beneath which the torrent swirled. It looked as though its swift erosion would soon bring the crumbling and beetling bank down, and the path would lead straight into the river. He must mention the fact at Butindi.
He stared at the jungle of the opposite bank, apparently lifeless and deserted, though menacing, secretive and uncanny. An ugly place. . . . Suppose the Germans bridged the river just here. . . . He found that he had come to a halt and was yearning to sit down. . . . He must not do that. He must keep moving. But he did not like that gap in the path where, for some yards, it ran along the edge of the bank. It was a gap in the wall, an open door in the house, a rent in the veil of protection. The jungle seemed a friend instead of a blinding and crippling hindrance, impediment, and obstacle, now that the path lay open and exposed along that flank. Suppose there were an ambush in the jungle on the other side of the narrow rushing river, and a heavy fire was opened upon his men as they passed? He could not get at an enemy so placed, nor return their fire for long, from an open place, while they were in densest cover. They could simply prohibit the passing of thesafari. . . . Anyhow, he’d leave a force there to blaze like fury into the jungle across the river if a shot were fired from there.
“Naik,” said he, to a corporal, “halt here with twenty men and line the edge of the bank. If you are fired at from across the river, pour in magazine fire as hard as you can go—and make the portersrunlike the devil across this gap.” He then translated, as well as he could, and marched on. He had done his best, anyhow.
For another hour he doggedly tramped on. The rain ceased, and the heat grew suffocating, stifling, terrible to bear. He feltthat he was breathing pure steam, and that he must climb a tree in search of air—dosomethingto relieve his panting lungs. . . . He tore his tunic open at the throat. . . .Help! he was going to faint and fall. . . . With a great effort he swung about and raised his hand for the “halt” and lowered it with palm horizontal downward for the “lie down.” . . . If the men were down themselves they would not realise that he had fallen. . . . It would not do to fall while marching at their head, to fall and lie there for the next man to stumble over him, to set an example of weakness. . . . The officer should be the last man to succumb to anything—but wounds—in front. . . .
He sank to the ground, and feeling that he was going to faint away, put his head well down between his knees, and, after a while, felt better.
“Bwanataking off tunic and belts,” said Ali Suleiman, “and I carry them.Bwanakeep only revolver, by damn, please God, sah.”
A bright idea! Why not? Where was the sense in marching through these foul swamps and jungles as though it were along the Queen’s Road at Bombay? And Ali, who would rather die than carry a load upon his head, like a lowshenziof a porter, would be proud to carry his master’s sword and personal kit.
In his shirt-sleeves, with exposed chest, Bertram felt another man, gave the signal to advance, and proceeded free of all impedimenta save his revolver. . . .
Suddenly the narrow, walled-in path debouched into a most beautiful open glade of trees like live oaks. These were not massed together; there was no undergrowth of bush; the grass was short and fine; the ground sloping slightly upward was gravelly and dry—the whole spot one of Africa’s freakish contrasts.
Bertram determined to halt the wholesafarihere, get it “closed up” into something like fours, and see every man, including the rear-guard, into the place before starting off again.
With the help of Ali, who interpreted to the headmen, he achieved his object, and, when he had satisfied himself that it was a case of “all present and correct,” he returned to the head of the column and sat him down upon the trunk of a fallen tree. . . .
Everybody, save the sentries, whom he had posted about the glade, squatted or lay upon the ground, each man beside his load. . . .
Though free now of the horrible sense of suffocation, he felt sick and faint, and very weary. Although he had not had a proper meal since he left theBarjordan, he was not hungry—or thought he was not. . . . Would it be his luck to be killed in the first fight that he took part in? Hisgoodluck? When one is ill and half starved, weary beyond words, and bearing a nightmare burden of responsibility in conditions as comfortless and rough as they can well be, Death seems less a grisly terror than a friend, bearing an Order of Release in his bony hand. . . .
Ali stood before him unbuckling his haversack.
“Please God, sah, I am buyingBwanathis chocolates in Mombasa when finding master got no grubs for emergency rasher,” said he, producing a big blue packet of chocolate.
“Good man!” replied Bertram. “I meant to get a stock of that myself. . . .”
He ate some chocolate, drank of the cold tea with which the excellent Ali had filled his water-bottle, and felt better.
After an hour’s rest he gave the order to fall in, the headmen of the porters got their respective gangs loaded up again, and thesafariwound snake-like from the glade along the narrow path once more, Bertram at its head. He felt he was becoming a tactical soldier as he sent a lance-naik to go the round of the sentries and bid them stand fast until the rear-guard had disappeared into the jungle, when they were to rejoin it.
On tramped thesafari, hour after hour, with occasional halts where the track widened, or the jungle, for a brief space, gave way to forest ordambo. Suddenly the head of the column emerged from the denser jungle into an undulating country of thicket, glade, scrub, and forest. Bertram saw the smoke of campfires far away to the left; and with one accord the porters commenced to beat their loads, drum-wise, with theirsafaristicks as they burst into some tribal chant or pæan of rejoicing. The convoy had reached Butindi in safety.
Half a mile beyond a village of the tiniest huts—built for themselves by the Kavirondo porters, and suggesting beehives rather than human habitations—Bertram beheld the entrenched and stockadedboma, zariba, or fort, that was to be his home for some months.
At that distance, it looked like a solid square of grass huts and tents, surrounded by a high wall. He guessed each side to be about two hundred yards in length. It stood in a clearing which gave a field of fire of some three hundred yards in every direction.
Halting the advance-guard, he formed it up from single file into fours; and, taking his kit from Ali, resumed it. Giving the order to march at “attention,” he approached theboma, above the entrance to which an officer was watching him through field-glasses.
Halting his men at the plank which crossed the trench, he bade them “stand easy,” and, leaving them in charge of a Havildar, crossed the little bridge and approached the gateway which faced sideways instead of outwards, and was so narrow that only one person at a time could pass through it.
Between the trench and the wall of thebomawas a space some ten yards in width, wherein a number of small men in blue uniform, who resembled neither Indians nor Africans, were employed upon the off-duty duties of the soldier—cleaning rifles and accoutrements, chopping wood, rolling puttees, preparing food, washing clothing, and pursuing trains of thought or insects.
Against the wall stood the long lean-to shelters, consisting of a roof of plaited palm-leaf, supported by poles, in which they lived. By the entrance was a guard-house, which suggested a rabbit-hutch; and a sentry, who, seeing the approach of an armed party, turned out the guard. The Sergeant of the Guard was an enormous man with a skin like fine black satin, a skin than which no satin could be blacker nor more shiny. He was an obvious negro, Nubian or Soudanese, but the men of the guard were small and fair, and wore blue turbans, of which the ornamental end hung tail-wise down their backs. Beneath their blue tunics were unpleated kilts or skirts, of a kind of blue tartan,reaching to their knees. They had blue puttees and bare feet.
Saluting the guard, Bertram entered thebomaand found himself in the High Street of a close-packed village of huts and tents, which were the dwelling-places of the officers, the hospital and sick-lines, the commissariat store, the Officers’ Mess, the cook-house, orderly-room, and offices.
In the middle of the High Street stood four poles which supported a roof. A “table” of posts and packing-case boards, surrounded by native bedsteads of wood and string—by way of seats—constituted this, the Officers’ Mess, Club, Common Room and Bar. A bunch of despondent-looking bananas hanging from the ridge-pole suggested food, and a bath containing a foot of water and an inch of mud suggested drink and cholera.
About the table sat several British officers in ragged shirts and shorts, drinking tea and eating nativechupatties. They looked ill and weary. The mosaic of scraps of stencilled packing-case wood, the tin plates, the biscuit-box “sugar-basin,” the condensed milk tin “milk-jug,” the battered metal teapot and the pile of sodden-lookingchupattiesmade as uninviting an afternoon tea ménage as could be imagined, particularly in that setting of muddy clay floor, rough and dirtyangarebs, and roof-and-wall thatch of withered leaves and grass. A typical scene of modern glorious war with its dirt, discomfort and privation, its disease, misery and weary boredom. . . .
Bertram approached the rickety grass hut and saluted.
A very tall man, with the face and moustache of a Viking, rose and extended his hand.
“How do, Greene?” said he. “Glad to see you. . . . Hope you brought the rum ration safe. . . . Take your bonnet off and undo your furs. . . . Hope that pistol’s not loaded. . . . Nor that sword sharp. . . . Oughtn’t to go about with nasty, dangerous things like that. . . . Hope the rum ration’s safe. . . . Have some tea and a bloater. . . . Berners, go and do Quartermaster, like a good lad. . . . Have some rum and a bloater, Greene. . . .”
“Thank you, sir,” said Bertram, noting that the big man had a crown on one shoulder of his shirt and a safety-pin spanning a huge hole on the other. His great arms and chest were bare, and a pair of corduroy riding-breeches, quite unfastened at the knee and calf, left an expanse of bare leg between their termination and the beginning of grey, sagging socks. Hob-nailed boots,fastened with string, completed his attire. He looked like a tramp, a scarecrow, and a strong leader of men.
“’Fraid you’ll have to drink out of a condensed milk tin, until your kit turns up. . .” said a pale and very handsome youth. “You get a flavour of milk, though,” he added with an air of impartiality, “as well as of tin and solder. . . . They burn your fingers so damnably, though, when you go to pick ’em up. . . . Or why not drink out of the teapot, if everyone has finished? . . . Yes—I’ll drop in a spot of condensed milk.”
“No—damn it all, Vereker,” put in the Major, “let’s do him well and create an impression. Nothing like beginning as you don’t mean to go on—or can’t possibly go on. . . . He can have The Glass this evening. And some fresh tea. And his own tin of condensed. . . . And a bloater. Hasn’t he brought us rum and hope? . . .”
The pale and handsome Vereker sighed.
“You create afalseimpression, sir,” he said, and, taking a key from his neck, arose and unlocked a big chop-box that stood in a corner of thebanda. Thence he produced a glass tumbler and set it before Bertram.
“There’s The Glass,” said he. “It’s now in your charge, present and correct. I’ll receive it from you and return the receipt at ‘Stand-to.’ . . .”
Bertram gathered that the tumbler was precious in the Major’s sight, and that honour was being shown him. He had a faint sense of having reached Home. He was disappointed when a servant brought fresh tea, a newly-opened tin of milk, and the lid of a biscuit-box for a plate, to discover that the banana which reposed upon it was the “bloater” of his hopes and the Major’s promise.
“For God’s sake use plenty of condensed milk,” said that gentleman, as Bertram put some into the glass, preparatory to pouring out his tea. Bertram thought it very kind and attentive of him—until he added: “And pour the teaonto it, and not down the side of the glass. . . . That’s how the other tumbler got done in. . . .”
As he gratefully sipped the hot tea and doubtfully munched achapatti, Bertram took stock of the other members of the Mess. Beside Major Mallery sat a very hard-looking person, a typical fighting-man with the rather low forehead, rather protruding ears,rather high cheek-bones, heavy jaw and jutting chin of his kind. He spoke little, and that somewhat truculently, wore a big heavy knife in his belt, looked like a refined prize-fighter, and answered to the name of Captain Macke.
Beside him, and in strong contrast, sat a young man of the Filbert genus. He wore a monocle, his nails were manicured, he spoke with the euphuism and euphemism of a certain Oxford type, he had an air of languor, boredom and acute refinement, was addressed as Cecil Clarence, when not as Gussie Augustus Gus, and seemed to be one of the very best.
On the same string bed, and in even stronger contrast, sat a dark-faced Indian youth. On his shoulder-straps were the letters I.M.S. and two stars. A lieutenant of the Indian Medical Service, and, as such, a member of this British Officers’ Mess. Bertram wondered why the fact that he had been to England and read certain books should have this result; and whether the society of the Subedar-Major of the regiment would have been preferred by the British officers. The young man talked a lot, and appeared anxious to show his freedom from anxiety, and his knowledge of English idiom and slang. When he addressed anyone by the nickname which intimate pals bestowed upon him, Bertram felt sorry for this youth with the hard staccato voice and raucous, mirthless laugh. Cecil Clarence said of him that “if one gave him an inch he took an ’ell of a lot for granted.” His name was Bupendranath Chatterji, and his papa sat cross-legged and bare-footed in the doorway of a little shop in a Calcutta bazaar, and lent moneys to the poor, needy and oppressed, for a considerable consideration.
“’Bout time for Stand-to, isn’t it?” said the Major, consulting his wrist-watch. “Hop it, young Clarence. . . . You might come round with me to-night, Greene, if you’ve finished tea. . . . Can’t offer you another bloater, I’m afraid. . . .”
The other officers faded away. A few minutes later a long blast was blown on a whistle, there were near and distant cries of “Stand-to,” and Cecil Clarence returned to the Messbanda. He was wearing tunic and cross-belt. On his cheerful young face was a look of portentous solemnity as he approached the Major, halted, saluted, stared at him as at a perfect stranger, and said: “Stand-to, sir. All present and correct.”
Over the Major’s face stole a similar expression. He looked asone who has received sudden, interesting and important but anxious news.
“Thank you,” said he. “I’ll—ah—go round. Yes. Come with me, will you? . . .” Cecil Clarence again saluted, and fell in behind the Major as he left thebanda. Bertram followed. The Major went to his tent and put on his tunic and cross-belt. These did little to improve the unfastenable riding-breeches, bare calves and grey socks, but were evidently part of the rite.
Proceeding thence to the entrance to theboma, the Major squeezed through, was saluted by the guard, and there met by an English officer in the dress of the small men whom Bertram had noticed on his arrival. His white face looked incongruous with the blue turban and tartan petticoat. “All present and correct, sir,” said he. Half his men were down in the trench, their rifles resting in the loop-holes of the parapet. These loop-holes were of wicker-work, like bottomless waste-paper baskets, and were built into the earthwork of the parapet so that a man, looking through one, had a foot of earth and logs above his head. The other half of his blue-clad force was inside thebomaand lining the wall. This wall, some eight feet in height, had been built by erecting two walls of stout wattle and posts, two feet apart, and then filling the space between these two with earth. Along the bottom of the wall ran a continuous fire-step, some two feet in height, and a line of wicker-work loop-holes pierced it near the top. In the angle, where this side of thebomamet the other, was a tower of posts, wattle and earth, some twelve feet in height, and on it, within an earth-and-wattle wall, and beneath a thatched roof, was a machine-gun and its team of King’s African Riflesaskaris, in charge of an English N.C.O. On the roof squatted a sentry, who stared at the sky with a look of rapt attention to duty.
“How are those two men, Black?” asked the Major, as the N.C.O. saluted.
“Very bad, sir,” was the reply. “They’ll die to-night. I’m quite sure the Germans had poisoned that honey and left it for ouraskaripatrols to find. I wondered at the time that they ’adn’t skoffed it themselves. . . . And it so near theirbomaand plain to see, an’ all. . . . I never thought about poison till it was too late. . . .”
“Foul swine!” said the Major. “I suppose it’s a trick they learnt from theshenzis, this poisoning wild honey? . . .”
“More like they taught it ’em, sir,” was the reply. “There ain’t no savage as low as a German, sir. . . . I lived in German East, I did, afore the war. . . . Iknow’em. . . .”
The next face of thebomawas held by the Hundred and Ninety-Eighth. Captain Macke met the Major and saluted him as a revered stranger. He, too, wore tunic and cross-belt and a look of portentous solemnity, such as that on the faces of the Major, Cecil Clarence, and, indeed, everybody else. Bertram, later, labelled it the Stand-to face and practised to acquire it.
“How many sick, Captain Macke?” enquired the Major.
“Twenty-seven, sir,” was the reply. Bertram wondered whether they were “present” in the spirit and “correct” in form.
“All fever or dysentery—or both, I suppose?” said the Major.
“Yes—except one with a poisoned foot and one who seems to be going blind,” was the reply.
As they passed along, the Major glanced at each man, looked into the canvas water-tanks, scrutinised the residential sheds beneath the wall—and, in one of them discovered a scrap of paper! As the ground was covered with leaves, twigs, and bits of grass, as well as being thick with mud, Bertram did not see that this piece of paper mattered much. This only shows his ignorance. The Major pointed at it, speechless. Captain Macke paled—with horror, wrath or grief. Gussie Augustus Gus stooped and stared at it, screwing his monocle in the tighter, that he might see the better and not be deceived. Vereker turned it over with his stick, and only then believed the evidence of three of his senses. The Jemadar shook his head with incredulous but pained expression. He called for the Havildar, whose mouth fell open. The two men were very alike, being relatives, but while the senior wore a look of incredulous pain, the junior, it seemed to Bertram, rather wore one of pained incredulity. That is to say, the Jemadar looked stricken but unable to believe his eyes, whereas the Havildar looked as though he could not believe his eyes but was stricken nevertheless.
All stared hard at the piece of paper. . . . It was a poignant moment. . . . No one moved and no one seemed to breathe. Suddenly the Havildar touched a Naik who stood behind his men, with his back to the group of officers, and stared fixedly at Nothing. He turned, beheld the paper at which the Havildar’saccusing finger pointed, rigid but tremulous. . . . What next? The Naik pocketed the paper, and the incident was closed.
Bertram was glad that he had witnessed it. He knew, thenceforth, the proper procedure for an officer who, wearing the Stand-to face, sees a piece of paper.
The third wall of thebomawas occupied by a company of Dogras of an Imperial Service Corps, under a Subedar, a fine-looking Rajput, and a company of Marathas of the Hundred and Ninety-Eighth, under the Subedar-Major of that regiment. Bertram was strongly attracted to this latter officer, and thought that never before had he seen an Indian whose face combined so much of patient strength, gentle firmness, simple honesty, and noble pride.
He was introduced to Bertram, and, as they shook hands and saluted, the fine old face was lit up with a smile of genuine pleasure and friendly respectfulness. A man of the old school who recognised duties as well as “rights”—and in whose sight “false to his salt” was the last and lowest epithet of uttermost degradation.
“You’ll have charge of this face of the fort to-morrow, Greene,” said the Major, as they passed on. “Subedar-Major Luxman Atmaram is a priceless old bird. He’ll see you have no trouble. . . . Don’t be in a hurry to tell him off for anything, because it’s a hundred to one you’ll find he’s right.”
Bertram smiled to himself at the thought of his being the sort to “tell off” anybody without due cause and was secretly pleased to find that Major Mallery had thought such a thing possible. . . .
The remaining side of the fort was held by Gurkhas, and Bertram noted the fact with pleasure. He had taken a great fancy to these cheery, steady people. Another machine-gun, with its team ofaskarisof the King’s African Rifles, occupied the middle of this wall.
“Don’t cough or sneeze near the gun,” murmured Vereker to Bertram, “or it may fall to pieces again. The copper-wire is all right, but the boot-lace was not new to begin with.”
“What kind of gun is it?” he asked.
“It was a Hotchkiss once. It’s a Hot-potch now,” was the reply. “Don’t touch it as you pass,” and the puzzled Bertram observed that it was actually bound with copper-wire at one point and tied with some kind of cord or string at another.
By the hospital—a horrible pit with a tent over it—stood the Indian youth and a party of Swahili stretcher-bearers.
Bertram wondered whether it would ever be his fate to be carried on one of those blood-stained stretchers by a couple of those negroes, laid on the mud at the bottom of that pit, and operated on by that young native of India. He shuddered. Fancy one’s life-blood ebbing away into that mud. Fancy dying, mangled, in that hole with no one but a Bupendranath Chatterji to soothe one’s last agonies. . . .
Having completed his tour of inspection, Major Mallery removed the Stand-to face and resumed his ordinary one, said: “They can dismiss,” to Captain Macke and the group of officers, and tore off his cross-belt and tunic.
All his hearers relaxed their faces likewise, blew their whistles, cried “Dismiss!” in the direction of their respective Native Officers, and removed their belts and tunics almost as quickly as they had removed their Stand-to faces.
They then proceeded to the Bristol Bar.
“Come along to the Bristol Bar and have a drink, Greene,” said Cecil Clarence,aliasGussie Augustus Gus, emerging from hisbanda, into which he had cast his tunic and Sam Browne belt.
“Thanks,” replied Bertram, wondering if there were a Jungle Hotel within easy reach of theboma, or whether the outpost had its own Place, “licensed for the sale of beer, wine, spirits, and tobacco, to be consumed on the premises. . . .”
In the High Street, next door to the Officers’ Mess, were two green tents, outside one of which stood a rough camp-table of the “folding” variety, a native string bed, and a circle of Roorkee chairs, boxes and stools. On an erection of sticks and withes, resembling an umbrella stand, stood an orderly array of fresh coco-nuts, the tops of which had been sliced off to display the white interior with its pint or so of sweet, limpid milk.
Emerging from the tent, an Arab “boy” in a blue turban, blue jacket buttoning up to the chin, blue petticoat and puttees,placed bottles of various kinds on the table, together with a “sparklet” apparatus and a pannikin of water. The Bristol Bar was open. . . . From the other tent emerged an officer in the blue uniform of the little fair men.
He eyed the muddy ground, the ugly greybandasof withered grass and leaves, the muddy, naked Kavirondo—piling their loads on the commissariat dump, and the general dreary, cheerless scene, with the cold eye of extreme distaste and disfavour.
“Yah!” said he. He eyed the bottles on the table.
“Ah!” said he, and seated himself behind the Bristol Bar.
“Start with a Ver-Gin, I think, as I’ve been such a good boy to-day,” he murmured, and, pouring a measure of Italian vermuth into an enamelled mug, he added a smaller allowance of gin.
“Wish some fool’d roll up so that I can get a drink,” he grumbled, holding the mug in his hand.
It did not occur to him to “faire Suisse,” as the French say—to drink alone. He must at least say “Chin-chin” or “Here’s how” to somebody else with a drink in his hand. Had it been cocoa, now, or something of that sort, one might drink gallons of it without a word to a soul. One could lie in bed and wallow and soak, lap it up like a cat or take it in through the pores—but this little drop of alcohol must not be drunk without a witness and a formula. So Lieutenant Forbes possessed his soul in impatience.
A minute later, from everybandaand tent, from the Officers’ Mess and from all directions, came British officers, bearing each man in his hands something to drink or something from which to drink.
The Major bore The Glass, and, behind him, the Mess butler carried a square bottle of ration whisky. He was followed by a Swahili clasping to his bosom a huge jar of ration rum, newly arrived. “Leesey” Lindsay, of the Intelligence Department, brought a collapsible silver cup, which, as he said, only wanted knowing. It leaked and it collapsed at inappropriate moments, but, on the other hand, itdidcollapse, and you could put it in your pocket—where it collected tobacco dust, crumbs, fluff, and grit. Vereker carried a fresh coco-nut and half a coco-nut shell. This latter he was going to carve and polish. He said that coco-nut shells carved beautifully and took a wonderful polish. . . . His uncle, an admiral, had one which he brought from the SouthSea Islands. It was beautifully carved and had taken a high polish—from someone or other. A cannibal chief had drunk human blood from it for years. . . . Vereker was going to drink whisky from his for years, and keep it all his life—carving and polishing it between whiles. . . . “Yes. I used that as a drinking-cup all through my first campaign. It nearly fell on my head in the first battle I ever fought. Cut off the tree by a bullet. Carved and polished it myself,” he would be able to say, in years to come. Meanwhile it looked a very ordinary half-shell of the common coco-nut of commerce as known to those who upon Saints’ Days and Festivals do roll, bowl, or pitch. . . .
Captain Macke brought a prepared siphon of “sparklet” water and his ration whisky. Gussie Augustus Gus walked delicately, bearing a brimming condensed milk tin, and singing softly—
“Dear, sweet Mother,Kind and true;She’s a boozer,Through and through . . . .But roll your tail,And roll it high,And you’ll be an angelBy and by. . . .”
“Dear, sweet Mother,Kind and true;She’s a boozer,Through and through . . . .But roll your tail,And roll it high,And you’ll be an angelBy and by. . . .”
Lieutenant Bupendranath Chatterji brought a harsh laugh and an uncultivated taste, but a strong liking, for assorted liquors, preferably sweet. The officer who had been in command of the side of the fort occupied by the men in blue entered the tent and, having removed his belt, seated himself beside Lieutenant Forbes, behind the bar.
“Good evening, Major,” said he; “won’t you come and have a drink? . . . Do!”
Regarding The Glass with a look of surprise, and as though wondering how the devil it came to be there, the Major considered the invitation.
“Thanks!” said he. “Don’t mind if Idosit down for a moment.” And he placed The Glass upon the table. Strangely enough, his own Roorkee chair was already in the centre of the circle facing the said table, as it had been any evening at this time for the last fifty nights. The Mess butler put the rum and whisky beneath his chair. “Let me introduce Lieutenant Greene, attached to Ours. Wavell . . .” said he. . . . “Captain Wavellof Wavell’s Arabs, Greene,” and Bertram shook hands with a remarkable and romantic soldier of fortune, explorer and adventurous knight-errant, whom he came to like, respect, and admire with the greatest warmth. The others drifted up and dropped in, accidentally and casually, as it were, until almost all were there, and the Bristol Bar was full; the hour of the evening star and the evening drink had arrived;l’heure d’absinthe,l’heure vertehad struck; the sun was below the yard-arm; now the day was over, night was drawing nigh, shadows of the evening stole across the sky; and, war or no war, hunger, mud, disease and misery, or no hunger, mud, disease and misery, the British officer was going to have his evening cocktail, his evening cheroot, and his evening “buck” at the club bar—and to the devil with all Huns who’d interfere with his sacred rights and their sacred rites.
“Here’s the best, Major,” said Forbes, and drank his ver-gin with gusto and appreciation. His very fine long-lashed eyes beneath faultlessly curving eyebrows—eyes which many a woman had enviously and regretfully considered to be criminally wasted on a mere man—viewed the grey prospect with less disgust. The first drink of the day provided the best minute of the day to this exile from the cream of the joys of Europe; and he eyed the array of bottles with something approaching optimism as he considered the question of what should be his drink for the evening.
“Cheerioh!” responded the Major, and took a pull at the whisky and slightly-aerated water in The Glass. “Here’s to Good Count Zeppelin—our finest recruiting agent, and Grandpa Tirpitz—who’ll bring America in on our side. . . .”
“What’ll you drink, Greene?” asked Wavell. “Vermuth? Whisky? Rum? Gin? Try an absinthe? Or can I mix you a Risky—rum and whisky, you know—or a Whum—whisky and rum, of course?”
“They’re both helpful and cheering,” added Forbes.
“Let me make you a cock-eye,” put in Gussie Augustus Gus. “Thing of my own. Much better than a mere cocktail. Thought of it in bed last night while I was sayin’ my prayers. This is one,” and he raised his condensed milk tin. “Cross between milk-punch, cocktail, high-ball, gin-sling, rum-shrub, and a bitters. . . . Go down to posterity as a ‘Gussie’—along with the John Collins and Elsie May. . . . Great thought. . . . Let us pause before it. . . .”
“What’s in it?” asked Captain Macke.
“Condensed milk,” replied Augustus, “ration lime-juice, ration rum, ration whisky, medical-comfort brandy, vermuth, coco-nut milk, angostura, absinthe, glycerine. . . .”
“And a damn great flying caterpillar,” added the Major as a hideous insect, with a fat, soft body, splashed into the pleasing compound.
“Dirty dog!” grumbled Augustus, fishing for the creature. “Here, don’t play submarines in the mud, Eustace—be a sport and swim. . . . I can drink down to him, anyhow,” he added, failing to secure the enterprising little animal with a finger and thumb that groped short of the bottom stratum of his concoction. “Got his head stuck in the toffee-milk at the bottom.” Bertram declined a “Gussie,” feeling unworthy, also unable.
“Have you tried rum and coco-nut milk?” asked Wavell. “It’s a kind of local industry since we’ve been here. The Intelligence Department keeps a Friendly Tribe at work bringing in fresh coco-nuts, and our numerous different detachments provide fatigue-parties in rotation to open them. . . . Many a worse drink than half a tumbler of ration rum poured into the coco-nut. . . .”
“Point of fact—I’m a teetotaller just at present,” replied Bertram, sadly but firmly. “May I substitute lime-juice for rum? . . .”
Vereker screwed in his monocle and regarded him. Not with astonishment or interest, of course, for nothing astonished or interested him any more. He was too young and wise for those emotions. But he regarded him.
“What a dreadful habit to contract at your age, Greene,” observed Augustus, slightly shocked. “Y’ought to pull yourself together, y’know. . . . Give it up. . . . Bad. . . . Bad. . .” and he shook his head.
“What’s it feel like?” asked Captain Macke.
“You’ve been getting into bad company, my lad,” said Major Mallery.
“Oah! Maan, maan! You must not do thatt!” said Mr. Chatterji.
“I’ve got some ration lime-juice here,” said Wavell, “but I really don’t advise it as a drink in this country. It’s useful stuff to have about when you can’t get vegetables of any sort—but I believe it thins your blood, gives you boils, and upsets yourtummy. . . . Drop of rum or whisky in the evening . . . do you more good.”
Bertram’s heart warmed to the kindly friendliness of his voice and manner—the more because he felt that, like himself, this famous traveller and explorer was of a shy and diffident nature.
“Thanks. I’ll take your advice then,” he said, and reflected that what was good enough for Wavell was good enough for him, in view of the former’s unique experience of African and Asiatic travel. “I’ll try the rum and coco-nut milk if I may,” he added.
“Three loud cheers!” remarked Augustus. “Won’t mother be pleased! . . . I’m going to write a book about it, Greene, if you don’t mind. . . . ‘The Redemption of Lieutenant Greene’ or somethin’. . . .Youknow—how on the Eve of Battle, in a blinding flash of self-illuminating introspection, he saw his soul for the Thing it was, saw just where he stood—on the brink of an Abyss. . . . And repented in time. . . . Poignant. . . . Repented and drank rum. . . . Searching.”
“Probably Greene’s pulling our legs the whole time, my good ass,” put in Vereker. “Dare say he’s really a frightful drunkard. Riotous reveller and wallowing wassailer. . . . He’s got rather a wild eye. . . .”
Bertram laughed with the rest. It was impossible to take offence, for there was nothing in the slightest degree offensive about these pleasant, friendly people.
Berners joined the group and saluted the Major. “Ammunition and ration indents all present and correct, sir,” said he.
“Rum ration all right?” asked the Major. “How do you know the jars aren’t full of water?”
“P’raps he’d better select one at random as a sample and bring it over here, Major,” suggested Macke. And it was so. . . .
Another officer drifted in and was introduced to Bertram as Lieutenant Halke of the Coolie Corps, in charge of the Kavirondo, Wakamba, and Monumwezi labourers and porters attached to the Butindi garrison.
He was an interesting man, a big, burly planter, who had been in the colony for twenty years. “I want your birds to dig another trench to-morrow, Halke,” said the Major. “Down by the water-picket.”
“Very good, sir,” replied Halke. “I’m glad that convoy rolled up safely to-day. Theirposho[167]was running rather low . . .” and the conversation became technical.
Bertram felt distinctly better for his rum and milk. His weariness fell from him like a garment, and life took on brighter hues. He was not a wretched, weary lad, caught up in the maelstrom of war and flung from pleasant city streets into deadly primeval jungles, where lurked Death in the form of bacillus, savage beast, and more savage and more beastly Man. Not at all. He was one of a band of Britain’s soldiers in an outpost of Empire on her far-flung battle-line. . . . One of a group of cheery comrades, laughing and jesting in the face of danger and discomfort. . . . He had Answered His Country’s Call, and was of the great freemasonry of arms, sword on thigh, marching, marching. . . . Camp-fire and bivouac. . . . The Long Trail. . . . Beyond the Ranges. . . . Men who have Done Things. . . . A sun-burnt, weather-beaten man from the Back of Beyond. . . . Strong, silent man with a Square Jaw. . . . Romance. . . . Adventure. . . . Life. He drank some more of his rum and felt very happy. He nodded, drooped, snored—and nearly fell off his stool. Wavell smiled as he jerked upright again, and tried to look as though he had never slept in his life.
“So Pappa behaved nasty,” Gussie Augustus Gus was saying to a deeply interested audience. “He’d just been turned down himself by a gay and wealthy widowette whom he’d marked down for his Number 2. When I said, ‘Pappa, I’m going to be married on Monday, please,’ he spake pompous platitudes, finishing up with: ‘A young man married is a young man marred.’ . . . ‘Yes, Pappa,’ says I thoughtlessly, ‘and an old man jilted is an old man jarred.’ . . . Caused quite a coolness. So I went to sea.” Augustus sighed and drank—and then almost choked with violent spluttering and coughing.
“That blasted Eustace!” he said, as he suddenly and vehemently expelled something.
“Did you marry her?” asked Vereker, showing no sympathy in the matter of the unexpected recovery of the body of Eustace.
“No,” said Augustus. “Pappa did.” . . .
“That’s what I went to see,” he added.
“Don’t believe you ever had a father,” said Vereker.
“I didn’t,” said Gussie Augustus Gus. “I was an orphan. . . . Am still. . . . Poignant. . . . Searching. . . .”
Lieutenant Bupendranath Chatterji listened to this sort of thing with an owlish expression on his fat face. When anybody laughed he laughed also, loudly and raucously.
It was borne in upon Bertram that it took more than fever, hunger, boredom, mud, rain and misery to depress the spirits of the officers of the garrison of Butindi. . . .
“Khana tyar hai,[168a]Sahib,” announced the Major’s butler, salaaming.
“Come and gnaw ropes and nibble bricks, Greene,” said the officer addressed, and with adieux to Wavell and Forbes, who ran a mess of their own, the guests departed from the Bristol Bar and entered the Officers’ Mess. Here Bertram learnt the twin delights of a native bedstead when used as a seat. You can either sit on the narrow wooden edge until you feel as though you have been sitting on a hot wire for a week, or you can slide back on to the string part and slowly, slowly disappear from sight, and from dinner.
“This water drawn from the river and been standing in the bath all day, boy?”
“Han,[168b]Sahib,” replied that worthy.
“Alum in the water?”
“Han,Sahib.”
“Water then filtered?”
“Han,Sahib.”
“Water then boiled?”
“Han,Sahib.”
“Pukkaboiled?”
“Han,Sahib, all bubbling.”
“Filtered again? You saw it all done yourself?”
“Han,Sahib.”
“That’s all right, then,” concluded the Major.
This catechism was the invariable prelude to the Major’s use of water for drinking purposes, whether in the form ofaqua pura, whisky and water, or tea. For the only foe that Major Mallery feared was the disease-germ. To bullet and bayonet, shrapnel and shell-splinter, he gave no thought. To cholera, enteric anddysentery he gave much, and if care with his drinking water would do it, he intended to avoid those accursed scourges of the tropics. Holding up the glass to the light of the hurricane lamp which adorned the clothless table of packing-case boards, he gazed through it—as one may do when caressing a glass of crusted ruby port—and mused upon the wisdom that had moved him to make it the sole and special work of one special man to see that he had a plentiful supply of pure fair water.
He gazed. . . . And slowly his idle abstracted gaze became a stare and a glare. His eyes protruded from his head, and he gave a yell of gasping horror and raging wrath that drew the swift attention of all—
While round and round in the alum-ised, filtered, boiled and re-filtered water, there slowly swam—a little fish.
* * * * *
Dinner was painfully similar to that at M’paga, save that the party, being smaller, was more of a Happy Family. It began with what Vereker called “Chatty” soup (because it was “made from talkative meat, in a chattie”), proceeded to inedible bully-beef, and terminated with dog-biscuit and coco-nut—unless you chose to eat your daily banana then.
During dinner, another officer, who had been out all day on a reconnaissance-patrol, joined the party, drank a pint of rum-and-coco-nut milk and fell asleep on the bedstead whereon he sat. He looked terribly thin and ill.
Macke punched him in the ribs, sat him up, and banged the tin plate of cold soup with his knife till the idea of “dinner” had penetrated the sleepy brain of the new-corner. “Feed yer face, Murie,” he shouted in his ear.
“Thanks awf’ly,” said that gentleman, took up his spoon, and toppled over backwards on to the bed with a loud snore.
“Disgustin’ manners,” said Gussie Augustus Gus.
“I wish we had a siphon of soda-water. I’d wake him all right.”
“Set him on fire,” suggested Vereker.
“He’s too beastly wet, the sneak,” complained Gussie.
“Oah, he iss sleepee,” observed Lieutenant Bupendranath Chatterji.
Vereker regarded him almost with interest.
“What makes you think so?” he asked politely. In the laughthat followed, the sleeper was forgotten and remained where he was until Stand-to the following morning. He was living on quinine and his nerves—which form an insufficient diet in tropical Africa.
“WhereBwanasleeping to-night, sah, please Mister?” whispered Ali, as, dinner finished, Bertram sat listening with deep interest to the conversation.
Pipes alight, and glasses, mugs and condensed milk tins charged, the Mess was talking of all things most distant and different from jungle swamps and dirty, weary war. . . .
“Quite most ’sclusive Society in Oxford, I tell you,” Gussie was saying. “Called ourselvesThe Astronomers. . . .”
“What the devil for? Because you were generally out at night?” asked Macke.
“No—because we studied the Stars—of the Stage,” was the reply. . . .
“Rotten,” said Vereker, with a shiver. “You sh’d have called yourselvesThe Botanists,” he added a minute later.
“Why?”
“Because you culled Peroxide Daisies and Lilies of the Ballet.”
“Ghastly,” observed Gussie, with a shudder. “Andcullis a beastly word. One who culls is a cully. . . . How’d you like to be calledCully, Murie?” he shouted in that officer’s ear. Receiving no reply, he pounded upon the sleeper’s stomach with one hand while violently rolling his head from side to side with the other.
Murie awoke.
“Whassup?” he jerked out nervously.
“How’d you like to be calledCully?” shouted Gussie again.
Murie fixed a glassy eye on him. His face was chalky white and his black hair lay dank across his forehead.
“Eh?” said he.
Gussie repeated his enquiry.
“Call me anything—but don’t call me early,” was the reply, as he realised who and where he was, and closed his eyes again.
“You’rean ornament to the Mess.Youadd to the gaiety of nations.Youought to be on the halls,” shouted the tormentor. “You’re a refined Society Entertainer. . . .”
“Eh?” grunted Murie.
“Come for a walk in the garden I said,” shouted Augustus.“Oh, you give me trypanosomiasis to look at you,” he added.
“You go to Hell,” replied Murie, and snored as he finished speaking.
Bertram felt a little indignant.
“Wouldn’t it be kinder to let him sleep?” he said.
“No, it wouldn’t,” was the reply. “He’ll sleep there for an hour, and then go over to his hut and be awake all night because he’s had no dinner.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Bertram—and asked the Major where he was to sleep that night.
“On your right side, with your mouth shut,” was the reply; to which Augustus added:
“Toe of the right foot in line with the mouth; thumb in rear of the seam of the pyjamas; heel of the left foot in the hollow of the back; and weight of the body on the chin-strap—as laid down in the drill-book.”
“Haven’t you a tent?” asked the Major, and, in learning that Bertram had not, said that abandashould be built for him on the morrow, and that he could sleep on or under the Mess table that night. . . .
When the Major had returned to his tent with the remark “All lights out in fifteen minutes,” Ali set up Bertram’s bed in the Messbanda, and in a few minutes the latter was alone. . . . As he sat removing his boots, Bertram was surprised to see Gussie Augustus Gus return to the Mess, carrying a native spear and a bundle of white material. Going to where Murie lay, he raised the spear and drove it with all his force—apparently into Murie’s body! Springing to his feet, Bertram saw that the spear was stuck into the clay and that the shaft, protruding through the meshes of the bed string, stood up beside Murie. Throwing the mosquito-net over the top of it, Gussie enveloped the sleeper in its folds, as well as he could, and vanished.
Bertram was awakened at dawn by the bustle and stir of Stand-to. He arose and dressed, by the simple process of putting on hisboots and helmet, which, by reason of rain, wind, mud and publicity, were the only garments he had removed. Proceeding to that face of the fort which was to be his special charge, he found that one half of its defenders were lining its water-logged trench, and the other half, its wall. It was a depressing hour and place. Depressing even to one who had not slept in his wet clothes and arisen with throbbing head, horrible mouth, aching limbs and with the sense of a great sinking void within.
Around the fort was a sea of withering brushwood, felled trees, scrub and thorn, grey and ugly: inside the fort, a lake of mud. Burly Subedar-Major Luxman Atmaram seemed cheery and bright, so Bertram endeavoured to emulate him.
The Major, accompanied by Vereker (who called himself Station Staff Officer, Aide-de-camp to the O.C. Troops, Assistant Provost Marshal, and other sonorous names), passed on his tour of inspection. Bertram saluted.
“Good morning, sir,” said he.
“Think so?” said the Major, and splashed upon his way.
“Good morning, Vereker,” said Bertram, as that gentleman passed.
“Nothing of the sort. Wrong again,” replied Vereker, and splashed uponhisway.
Both were wearing the Stand-to face, and looked coldly upon Bertram, who was not.
After “Dismiss,” Bertram returned to the Messbanda.
“Good morning, Greene,” said the Major, and:
“Good morning, Greene,” echoed Vereker.
Bertram decided that his not being properly dressed in the matter of the Stand-to face, was overlooked or condoned, in view of his youth and inexperience. . . . The vast metal teapot and a tray of dog-biscuits made their appearance.
“I’m going to have my bloater now,” said Berners, plucking a banana from the weary-looking bunch. “Will someone remind me that I have had it, if I go to take another?”
“I will,” volunteered Augustus. “Any time you pluck a bloater and I hit you on the head three times with the tent-peg mallet, that means ‘Nay, Pauline.’ See?” . . .
“What’s the Programme of Sports for to-day, sir?” asked Berners of the Major, as he cleansed his fingers of over-ripe banana upon Augustus’s silky hair.
“Macke takes a strong Officer’s Patrol towards Muru,” replied the Major. “Halke starts getting the trenches deepened a bit. You can wrestle with commissariat and ammunition returns, and the others might do a bit of parade and physical jerks or something this morning. I’m going to sneak round and catch the pickets on the hop. You’d better come with me, Greene, and see where they’re posted. Tell the Subedar-Major what you want your men to do. Wavell’s taking his people for a march. Murie will be in charge of the fort. . . .”
“Murie has temperature of one hundred and five,” put in Lieutenant Bupendranath Chatterji. “He has fever probably.”
“Shouldn’t be at all surprised,” observed the Major dryly. “What are you giving him?”
“Oah, he will be all right,” was the reply.
“I’ve got three fresh limes I pinched from thatshamba,”[173]said Augustus. “If he had those with a quart of boiling water and half a tin of condensed milk, he might be able to do a good sweat and browse a handful of quinine.”
“No more condensed milk,” said Berners. “Greene had the last tin last night, and the hog didn’t bring any with him.”
“I shall be delighted to contribute the remainder of it,” said Bertram, looking into his tin. “There’s quite three-quarters of it left.”
“Good egg,” applauded Augustus. “If you drink your tea from the tin, you’ll get the flavour of milk for ever so long,” and Ali having been despatched to the cook-house for a kettle of boiling water, Augustus fetched his limes and the two concocted the brew with their condensed milk and lime-juice in an empty rum-jar.
“What about a spot of whisky in it?” suggested Vereker.
“Better without it when fever is violent,” opined the medical attendant, and Augustus, albeit doubtfully, accepted theobiter dicta, as from one who should know.
“Shall I shove it into him through the oil-funnel if he is woozy?” he asked, and added: “Better not, p’r’aps. Might waste half of it down his lungs and things . . .” and he departed, in search of his victim.
As Bertram left thebomain company of the Major, he found it difficult to realise that, only a few hours earlier he had notset eyes on the place. He seemed to have been immured within its walls of mud and wattle for days, rather than hours.
About the large clearing that lay on that side of the fort, Sepoys, servants, porters andaskariscame and went upon their occasions; the stretcher-bearers, gun-teams, and a company of Gurkhas were at drill; and in the trenches, the long, weedy bodies of the Kavirondo rose and fell as they dug in the mud and clay. Near the gate a doleful company of sick and sorry porters squatted and watched a dresser of the Indian Subordinate Medical Department, as he sprinkled iodoform from a pepperbox on to the hideous sores and wounds of a separate squad requiring such treatment. The sight of an intensely black back, with a huge wound of a glowing red, upon which fell a rain of brilliant yellow iodoform, held Bertram’s spell-bound gaze, while it made him feel exceedingly sick. Those patients suffering from ghastly sores and horrible festering wounds seemed gay and lighthearted and utterly indifferent, while the remainder, suffering fromtumbo,[174]fever, cold in the head, or world-weariness, appeared to consider themselves at the last gasp, and each, like the Dying Gladiator, did lean his head upon his hand while his manly brow consented to Death, but conquered agony.
“The reason why the African will regard a gaping wound, or great festering sore, with no more than mild interest, while he will wilt away and proceed to perish if he has a stomach-ache is an interestin’ exemplification ofomne ignotum pro magnifico,” remarked the Major.
Bertram stared at his superior officer in amazement. The tone and language were utterly different from those hitherto connected, in Bertram’s experience, with that gentleman. Was this a subtle mockery of Bertram as a civilian Intellectual? Or was it that the Major liked to be “all things to all men” and considered this the style of conversation likely to be suitable to the occasion?
“Yes, sir?” said Bertram, a trifle shortly.
“Yes,” continued Major Mallery. “He believes that all internal complaints are due to Devils. A stomach-ache is, to him, painful and irrefragible proof that he hath a Devil. One has entered into him and abideth. It’s no good telling him anything to the contrary—because he canfeelIt there, and surely he’s thebest judge of what he can feel? So any internal complaint terrifies him to such an extent that he dies of fright—whereas he’ll think nothing of a wound that would kill you or me. . . .”
Here, apparently, the Major’s mocking fancy tired, or else his effort to talk “high-brow” to an Intellectual could be no further sustained, for he fell to lower levels with the remark:
“Rum blokes. . . Dam’ funny. . .” and fell silent.
A well-trodden mud path led down to the river, on the far side of which was the water-picket commanding the approach, not to a ford, but to the only spot where impenetrable jungle did not prevent access to the river. . . .
“Blighters nearly copped us badly down here before we built the fort,” said the Major. “Look in here . . .” and he parted some bushes beside the path and disappeared. Following him, Bertram found himself in a long, narrow clearing cut out of the solid jungle and parallel with the path.
“They had a hundred men at least, in here,” said Major Mallery, “and you might have come along the path a hundred times without spotting them. There was a machine-gun up that tree, to deal with the force behind the point of ambush, and a big staked pit farther down the path to catch those in front who ran straight on. . . . Lovely trap. . . . They used to occupy it from dawn to sunset every day, poor fellers. . . .”
“What happened?” asked Bertram.
“Our Intelligence Department learnt all about it from the localshenzis, and we forestalled them one merry morn. They were ambushed in their own ambush. . . . Theshenzidoesn’t love his Uncle Fritz a bit. No appreciation ofKultur-by-kiboko. He calls the Germans ‘the Twenty-Five Lashes People,’ because the first thing the German does when he goes to a village is to give everybody twenty-five of the best, by way of introducing himself and starting with a proper understanding. Puts things on a proper footing from the beginning. . . .”
“Theiraskarisare staunch enough, aren’t they?” asked Bertram.
“Absolutely. They are well paid and well fed, and they are allowed to do absolutely as they like in the way of loot, rape, arson and murder, once the fighting is over. . . . They flog them most unmercifully for disciplinary offences—and the niggerunderstands that. Also they leave the defeated foe—his village, crops, property, women, children and wounded—to their mercy—and the nigger understandsthattoo. . . . Ouraskarisare not nearly so contented with our milder punishments, cumbrous judicial system, and absolute prohibition of loot, rape, arson and the murder of the wounded. Yes—the Germanaskariwill stick to the German so long as he gets the conqueror’s rights whenever he conquers—as is the immemorial law and custom of Africa. . . . ‘What’s the good of fighting a cove if you’re going to cosset and coddle him directly you’ve won, and give him something out of the poor-box—instead of dismembering him?’ says he. . . . You might say theaskari-class is to the Native what the Junker-class is to the peasant, in Germany.”
And conversing thus, the two officers visited the pickets and the sentries, who sat onmachansin the tops of high trees and, in theory at any rate, scoured the adjacent country with tireless all-seeing eye.
Returning to the fort, Bertram saw the materials for his own private freehold residence being carried to the eligible site selected for its erection by the united wisdom of the Station Staff Officer and the Quartermaster. It was built and furnished in less than an hour by a party of Kavirondo, who used no other tools than theirpangas, and it consisted of a framework of stout saplings firmly planted in the ground, wattle, and thatched leaves, twigs and grass. It had a window-frame and a doorway, and it kept out the sun and the first few drops of a shower of rain. If abandadoes little else, it provides one’s own peculiar place apart, where one can be private and alone. . . . On the table and shelf—of sticks bound together with strips of bark—Ali set forth his master’s impedimenta, and took a pride in the Home. . . .
Finding that the spine-pad of quilted red flannel—which Murray had advised him to get and to wear buttoned on to the inner side of his shirt, as a protection against the sun’s actinic rays—was soaked with perspiration, Bertram gave it to Ali that it might be dried. What he did not foresee was that his faithful retainer would tie a long strip of bark from the newbandato the opposite one across the “street,” and pin the red flannel article to flap in the breeze and the face of the passer-by. . . .
“Oh, I say, you fellers, look here!” sang out the voice of Gussie Augustus Gus, as Bertram was finishing his shave, a few minuteslater. “Here’s that careless fellow, Greene, been and left his chest-protector off! . . . It’s on the line to air, and Idon’tknow what he’s doing without it.” The voice broke with anguish and trouble as it continued: “Perhaps running about with nothing on at all. . . . On his chest, I mean. . . .”
There was a laugh from neighbouringbandasand tents where Vereker, Berners, Halke and “Leesey” Lindsay were washing by their cottage doors, preparatory to breakfast.
Bertram blushed hotly in the privacy of his hut.Chest-protector! Confound the fellow’s impudence—and those giggling’ idiots. He had half a mind to put his head out and remark; “The laughter of fools is as the crackling of thorns beneath a pot,” and in the same moment wiser counsels prevailed.
Thrusting a soapy face out of the window, he said, in a tone expressive more of sorrow than of anger:
“I am surprised atyou, Clarence! . . . To laugh at the infirmities of your elders! . . . Is itmyfault I have housemaid’s knee?”
To which Augustus, with tears in his eyes and voice, replied:
“Forgive me, Pappa. I have known trouble too.Ihad an Aunt with a corn. . . .Shewore one. . . . Pink, like yours. . . . Poignant. . . . Searching. . . .”
This cheerful and indefatigable young gentleman had, in his rôle of Mess President, found time, after parade and kit-inspection that morning, to prepare a breakfastmenu. Consulting it, Bertram discovered promise of
1.Good Works. Taken out of some animal, or animals, unknown. Perhaps Liver. Perhaps not. Looks rather poignant.2.Shepherd’s Bush(or is it Plaid or Pie?) or Toed-in-the-Hole. Same as above, bedded down in manioc. Looks very poignant.3. There wereSausages on Toast, but they are in bad odour, uppish, and peevish to the eye, and there is no bread.4.Curried Bully-beef. God help us. And Dog-biscuit.5.Arm of monkey. No ’arm in that?But—One rupee reward is offered for a missing Kavirondo baby. Answers to the name of Horatio, and cries if bitten in the stomach. . . . Searching.
1.Good Works. Taken out of some animal, or animals, unknown. Perhaps Liver. Perhaps not. Looks rather poignant.
2.Shepherd’s Bush(or is it Plaid or Pie?) or Toed-in-the-Hole. Same as above, bedded down in manioc. Looks very poignant.
3. There wereSausages on Toast, but they are in bad odour, uppish, and peevish to the eye, and there is no bread.
4.Curried Bully-beef. God help us. And Dog-biscuit.
5.Arm of monkey. No ’arm in that?But—One rupee reward is offered for a missing Kavirondo baby. Answers to the name of Horatio, and cries if bitten in the stomach. . . . Searching.
“Great news,” quoth the author of this document, seating himself on the bed-frame beside Bertram and eyeing a plate of Good Works without enthusiasm. “There’s to be a General Court-Martial after breakfast. You and I and Berners. Leesey Lindsayis prosecuting a bloke for spying and acting as guide to German raiding parties—him bein’ a British subjick an’ all. . . Splendid! . . . Shall we hang him or shoot him? . . .”
“Iam Provost-Marshal,” put in Vereker, “andIshall hang him. I know exactly how to hang, and am a recognised good hanger. Anyhow, no one has complained. . . . Wish we had some butter. . . .”
“Whaffor?” asked Augustus.
“Grease the rope,” was the reply. “They like it. Butter is awfully good.”
“Put the knot under the left ear, don’t you?” asked Augustus.
“Ido,” answered Vereker. “Some put it under the right. . . . I have seen it at the back. Looks bad, though. Depressin’. Bloke hangs his head. Mournful sight. . . .”
“Got any rope?” enquired Augustus.
“No! . . . How thoughtless of me! . . . Never mind—make up something with strips of bark. . . . Might let the bloke make his own—only himself to blame, then, if it broke and he met with an accident.”
“Ihaveheard of suicides—and—people hanging themselves with their braces,” observed Augustus.
“Wadegoshenzisdon’t have braces,” replied Vereker.
“No, but Greene does. I’m perfectly sure he’d be delighted to lend you his. He’s kindness itself. Or would you rather he were shot, Greene? We must remember there’s no blood about a hanging, whereas there’s lots the other way—’specially if it’s done byaskariswith Martinis. . . . On the other hand, hanging lasts longer. I dunnowhatto advise for the best. . . .”
“Suppose we try him first,” suggested Bertram.