Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

LAND AND SEA TALES

FOR BOYS AND GIRLS

Books by Rudyard Kipling

Actions and Reactions

Brushwood Boy, The

Captains Courageous

Collected Verse

Day’s Work, The

Departmental Ditties and Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads

Diversity of Creatures, A

Eyes of Asia, The

Feet of the Young Men, The

Five Nations, The

France at War

Fringes of the Fleet

From Sea to Sea

History of England, A

Irish Guards in the Great War, The

Jungle Book, The

Jungle Book, Second

Just So Song Book

Just So Stories

Kim

Kipling Anthology Prose and Verse

Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know

Kipling Birthday Book, The

Letters of Travel

Life’s Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own People

Light That Failed, The

Many Inventions

Naulahka, The (With Wolcott Balestier)

Plain Tales From the Hills

Puck of Pook’s Hill

Rewards and Fairies

Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Inclusive Edition, 1885–1918

Sea Warfare

Seven Seas, The

Soldier Stories

Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsbys, and In Black and White

Song of the English, A

Songs from Books

Stalky & Co.

They

Traffics and Discoveries

Under the Deodars, The Phantom Rickshaw, and Wee Willie Winkie

With the Night Mail

Years Between, The

Land and Sea Tales for Boys and Girls

By Rudyard Kipling

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1923

COPYRIGHT, 1893, 1895, 1897, 1898, 1900, 1918, 1920, 1922, 1923, BY

RUDYARD KIPLING

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION

INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES

AT

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

First Edition

PREFACE

To all to whom this little book may come—

Health for yourselves and those you hold most dear;

Content abroad, and happiness at home,

And—one grand secret in your private ear:—

Nations have passed away and left no traces,

And History gives the naked cause of it—

One single, simple reason in all cases;

They fell because their people were not fit.

Now, though your Body be mis-shapen, blind,

Lame, feverish, lacking substance, power or skill,

Certain it is that men can school the Mind

To school the sickliest Body to her will—

As many have done, whose glory blazes still

Like mighty fires in meanest lanterns lit:

Wherefore, we pray the crippled, weak and ill—

Be fit—be fit! In mind at first be fit!

And, though your Spirit seem uncouth or small,

Stubborn as clay or shifting as the sand,

Strengthen the Body, and the Body shall

Strengthen the Spirit till she take command;

As a bold rider brings his horse in hand

At the tall fence, with voice and heel and bit,

And leaps while all the field are at a stand.

Be fit—be fit! In body next be fit!

Nothing on earth—no arts, no gifts, nor graces—

No fame, no wealth—outweighs the want of it.

This is the Law which every law embraces—

Be fit—be fit! In mind and body be fit!

The even heart that seldom slurs its beat—

The cool head weighing what that heart desires—

The measuring eye that guides the hands and feet—

The Soul unbroken when the Body tires—

These are the things our weary world requires

Far more than superfluities of wit;

Wherefore we pray you, sons of generous sires,

Be fit—be fit! For Honour’s sake be fit.

There is one lesson at all Times and Places—

One changeless Truth on all things changing writ,

For boys and girls, men, women, nations, races—

Be fit—be fit! And once again, be fit!

CONTENTS

Land and Sea Tales

For Boys and Girls

WINNING THE VICTORIA CROSS

The history of the Victoria Cross has been told so often that it is only necessary to say that the Order was created by Queen Victoria on January 29th, 1856, in the year of the peace with Russia, when the new racing Cunard paddle-steamer Persia of three thousand tons was making thirteen knots an hour between England and America, and all the world wondered at the advance of civilization and progress.

Any officer of the English Army, Navy, Reserve or Volunteer forces, from a duke to a negro, can wear on his left breast the little ugly bronze Maltese cross with the crowned lion atop and the inscription “For Valour” below, if he has only “performed some signal act of valour” or devotion to his country “in the presence of the enemy.” Nothing else makes any difference; for it is explicitly laid down in the warrant that “neither rank, nor long service, nor wounds, nor any other circumstance whatsoever, save the merit of conspicuous bravery, shall be held to establish a sufficient claim to this Order.”

There are many kinds of bravery, and if one looks through the records of the four hundred and eleven men, living and dead, that have held the Victoria Cross before the Great War, one finds instances of every imaginable variety of heroism.

There is bravery in the early morning, when it takes great courage even to leave warm blankets, let alone walk into dirt, cold and death; on foot and on horse; empty or fed; sick or well; coolness of brain, that thinks out a plan at dawn and holds to it all through the long, murderous day; bravery of the mind that makes the jerking nerves hold still and do nothing except show a good example; sheer reckless strength that hacks through a crowd of amazed men and comes out grinning on the other side; enduring spirit that wears through a long siege, never losing heart or manners or temper; quick, flashing bravery that heaves a lighted shell overboard or rushes the stockade while others are gaping at it, and the calculated craftsmanship that camps alone before the angry rifle-pit or shell-hole, and cleanly and methodically wipes out every soul in it.

Before the Great War, England dealt with many different peoples, and, generally speaking, all of them, Zulu, Malay, Maori, Burman, Boer, the little hillsman of the Northeast Indian Frontier, Afreedi, Pathan, Biluch, the Arab of East Africa and the Sudanese of the North of Africa and the rest, played a thoroughly good game. For this we owe them many thanks; since they showed us every variety of climate and almost every variety of attack, from long-range fire to hand-to-hand scrimmage; except, of course, the ordered movements of Continental armies and the scientific ruin of towns.... That came later and on the largest scale.

It is rather the fashion to look down on these little wars and to call them “military promenades” and so forth, but in reality no enemy can do much more than poison your wells, rush your camp, ambuscade you, kill you with his climate, fight you body to body, make you build your own means of communication under his fire, and horribly cut up your wounded. He may do this on a large or small scale, but the value of the teaching is the same.

It is in these rough-and-tumble affairs that many of the first Crosses were won; and some of the records for the far-away Crimea and the Indian Mutiny are well worth remembering, if only to show that valour never varies.

The Crimea was clean fighting as far as the enemy were concerned,—for the very old men say that no one could wish for better troops than the Russians of Inkerman and Alma,—but our own War Office then, as two generations later, helped the enemy with ignorant mismanagement and neglect. In the Mutiny of 1857 all India, Bengal and the North West Provinces, seemed to be crumbling like sand-bag walls in flood, and wherever there were three or four Englishmen left, they had to kill or be killed till help came. Hundreds of Crosses must have been won then, had anybody had time to notice; for the average of work allowing for the improvements in man-killing machinery was as high as in the Great War.

For instance—this is a rather extensive and varied record—one man shut up in the Residency at Lucknow stole out three times at the risk of his life to get cattle for the besieged to eat. Later, he extinguished a fire near a powder-magazine and a month afterwards put out another fire. Then he led twelve men to capture two guns which were wrecking the Residency at close range. Next day he captured an out-lying position full of mutineers; three days later he captured another gun, and finished up by capturing a fourth. So he got his Cross.

Another young man was a lieutenant in the Southern Mahratta Horse, and a full regiment of mutineers broke into his part of the world, upsetting the minds of the people. He collected some loyal troopers, chased the regiment eighty miles, stormed the fort they had taken refuge in, and killed, captured or wounded every soul there.

Then there was a lance corporal who afterwards rose to be Lieutenant-Colonel. He was the enduring type of man, for he won his Cross merely for taking a hand in every fight that came along through nearly seventy consecutive days.

There were also two brothers who earned the Cross about six times between them for leading forlorn hopes and such-like. Likewise there was a private of “persuasive powers and cheerful disposition,” so the record says, who was cut off with nine companions in a burning house while the mutineers were firing in at the windows. He, however, cheerfully persuaded the enemy to retire and in the end all his party were saved through his practical “cheerfulness.” He must have been a man worth knowing.

And there was a little man in the Sutherland Highlanders—a private who eventually became a Major-General. In one attack near Lucknow he killed eleven men with his claymore, which is a heating sort of weapon to handle.

Even he was not more thorough than two troopers who rode to the rescue of their Colonel, cut off and knocked down by mutineers. They helped him to rise, and they must have been annoyed, for the three of them killed all the mutineers—about fifty.

Then there was a negro captain of the foretop, William Hall, R. N., who with two other negroes, Samuel Hodge and W. J. Gordon of the 4th and 1st West Indian Infantry, came up the river with the Naval Brigade from Calcutta to work big guns. They worked them so thoroughly that each got a Cross. They must have done a good deal, for no one is quite so crazy reckless as a West Indian negro when he is really excited.

There was a man in the Mounted Police who with sixty horsemen charged one thousand mutineers and broke them up. And so the tale runs on.

Three Bengal Civilian Government officers were, I believe, the only strict non-combatants who ever received the Cross. As a matter of fact they had to fight with the rest, but the story of “Lucknow” Kavanagh’s adventures in disguise, of Ross Mangle’s heroism after the first attempt to relieve the Little House at Arrah had failed (Arrah was a place where ten white men and fifty-six loyal natives barricaded themselves in a billiard-room in a garden and stood the siege of three regiments of mutineers for three weeks), and of McDonnel’s cool-headedness in the retreat down the river, are things that ought to be told by themselves. Almost any one can fight well on the winning side, but those men who can patch up a thoroughly bad business and pull it off in some sort of shape, are most to be respected.

Army chaplains and doctors are officially supposed to be non-combatants—they are not really so—but about twenty years after the Mutiny a chaplain was decorated under circumstances that made it impossible to overlook his bravery. Still, I do not think he quite cared for the publicity. He was a regimental chaplain—in action a chaplain is generally supposed to stay with or near the doctor—and he seems to have drifted up close to a cavalry charge, for he helped a wounded officer of the Ninth Lancers into an ambulance. He was then going about his business when he found two troopers who had tumbled into a water-course all mixed with their horses, and a knot of Afghans were hurrying to attend to them. The record says that he rescued both men, but the tale, as I heard it unofficially, declares that he found a revolver somewhere with which he did excellent work while the troopers were struggling out of the ditch. This seems very possible, for the Afghans do not leave disabled men without the strongest hint, and I know that in nine cases out of ten if you want a coherent account of what happened in an action you had better ask the chaplain or the Roman Catholic priest of a battalion.

But it is difficult to get details. I have met perhaps a dozen or so of V. C.’s, and in every case they explained that they did the first thing that came to their hand without worrying about alternatives. One man headed a charge into a mass of Afghans, who are very good fighters so long as they stay interested in their work, and cut down five of them. All he said was: “Well, they were there, and they couldn’t go away. What was a man to do? Write ’em a note and ask ’em to shift?”

Another man I questioned was a doctor. Army doctors, by the way, have special opportunities for getting Crosses. Their duty compels them to stay somewhere within touch of the firing line, and most of them run right up and lie down, keeping an eye on the wounded.

It is a heart-breaking thing for a doctor who has pulled a likely young private of twenty-three through typhoid fever and set him on his feet and watched him develop, to see the youngster wasted with a casual bullet. It must have been this feeling that made my friend do the old, splendid thing that never grows stale—rescue a wounded man under fire. He won this Cross, but all he said was: “I didn’t want any unauthorized consultations—or amputations—while I was Medical Officer in charge. ’Tisn’t etiquette.”

His own head was very nearly blown off as he was tying up an artery—for it was blind, bad bushfighting, with puffs of smoke popping in and out among the high grass and never a man visible—but he only grunted when his helmet was cracked across by a bullet, and went on tightening the tourniquet.

As I have hinted, in most of our little affairs before the war, the enemy knew nothing about the Geneva Convention or the treatment of wounded, but fired at a doctor on his face value as a white man. One cannot blame them—it was their custom, but it was exceedingly awkward when our doctors took care of their wounded who did not understand these things and tried to go on fighting in hospital.

There is an interesting tale of a wounded Sudanese—what our soldiers used to call a “fuzzy”—who was carefully attended to in a hospital after a fight. As soon as he had any strength again, he proposed to a native orderly that they two should massacre all the infidel wounded in the other beds. The orderly did not see it; so, when the doctor came in he found the “Fuzzy” was trying to work out his plan single-handed. The doctor had a very unpleasant scuffle with that simple-minded man, but, at last, he slipped the chloroform-bag over his nose. The man understood bullets and was not afraid of them; but this magic smelly stuff that sent him to sleep, cowed him altogether, and he gave no more trouble in the ward.

So a doctor’s life is always a little hazardous and, besides his professional duties, he may find himself senior officer in charge of what is left of the command, if the others have been shot down. As doctors are always full of theories, I believe they rather like this chance of testing them. Sometimes doctors have run out to help a mortally wounded man of their battalion, because they know that he may have last messages to give, and it eases him to die with some human being holding his hand. This is a most noble thing to do under fire, because it means sitting still among bullets. Chaplains have done it also, but it is part of what they reckon as their regular duty.

Another V. C. of my acquaintance—he was anything but a doctor or a chaplain—once saved a trooper whose horse had been killed. His method was rather original. The man was on foot and the enemy—Zulus this time—was coming down at a run, and the trooper said, very decently, that he did not see his way to perilling his officer’s life by double-weighting the only available horse.

To this his officer replied: “If you don’t get up behind me, I’ll get off and give you such a licking as you’ve never had in your life.” The man was more afraid of fists than of assagais, and the good horse pulled them both out of the scrape. Now by our Regulations an officer who insults or “threatens with violence” a subordinate in the Service is liable to lose his commission and to be declared “incapable of serving the King in any capacity,” but for some reason or other the trooper never reported his superior.

The humour and the honour of fighting are by no means all on one side. A good many years ago there was a war in New Zealand against the Maoris, who, though they tortured prisoners and occasionally ate a man, liked fighting for its own sake. One of their chiefs cut off a detachment of our men in a stockade where he might have starved them out, and eaten them at leisure later. But word reached him that they were short of provisions, and so he sent in a canoeful of pig and potatoes with the message that it was no fun to play that game with weak men, and he would be happy to meet them after rest and a full meal. There are many cases in which men, very young as a rule, have forced their way through a stockade of thorns that hook or bamboos that cut and held on in the face of heavy fire or just so long as served to bring up their comrades. Those who have done this say that getting in is exciting enough, but the bad time, when the minutes drag like hours, lies between the first scuffle with the angry faces in the smoke, and the “Hi, get out o’ this!” that shows that the others of our side are tumbling up behind. They say it is as bad as foot-ball when you get off the ball just as slowly as you dare, so that your own side may have time to come up.

Most men, after they have been shot over a little, only want a lead to do good work; so the result of a young man’s daring is often out of all proportion to his actual performances.

Here is a case which never won notice because very few people talked about it—a case of the courage of Ulysses, one might say.

A column of troops, heavily weighted with sick and wounded, had drifted into a bad place—a pass where an enemy, hidden behind rocks, were picking them off at known ranges, as they retreated. Half a battalion was acting as rear-guard—company after company facing about on the narrow road and trying to keep down the wicked, flickering fire from the hillsides. And it was twilight; and it was cold and raining; and it was altogether horrible for everyone.

Presently, the rear-guard began to fire a little too quickly and to hurry back to the main body a little too soon, and the bearers put down the ambulances a little too often, and looked on each side of the road for possible cover. Altogether, there were the makings of a nasty little breakdown—and after that would come primitive slaughter.

A boy whom I knew was acting command of one company that was specially bored and sulky, and there were shouts from the column of “Hurry up! Hurry there!” neither necessary nor soothing. He kept his men in hand as well as he could, hitting down rifles when they fired wild, till someone along the line shouted: “What on earth are you fellows waiting so long for?”

Then my friend—I am rather proud that he was my friend—hunted for his pipe and tobacco, filled the bowl in his pocket because, he said afterwards, he didn’t want any one to see how his hand shook, lit a fuzee, and shouted back between very short puffs: “Hold on a minute. I’m lighting my pipe.”

There was a roar of rather crackly laughter and the company joker said: “Since you are so pressin’, I think I’ll ’ave a draw meself.”

I don’t believe either pipe was smoked out, but—and this is a very big but—the little bit of acting steadied the company, and the news of it ran down the line, and even the wounded in the doolies laughed, and everyone felt better. Whether the enemy heard the laughing, or was impressed by the even “one-two-three-four” firing that followed it, will never be known, but the column came to camp at the regulation step and not at a run, with very few casualties. That is what one may call the courage of the much-enduring Ulysses, but the only comment that I ever heard on the affair was the boy’s own, and all he said was: “It was transpontine (which means theatrical), but necessary.”

Of course he must have been a good boy from the beginning, for little bits of pure inspiration seldom come to or are acted upon by slovens, self-indulgent or undisciplined people. I have not yet met one V. C. who had not strict notions about washing and shaving and keeping himself decent on his way through the civilized world, whatever he may have done outside it.

Indeed, it is very curious, after one has known hundreds of young men and young officers, to sit still at a distance and watch them come forward to success in their profession. Somehow, the clean and considerate man mostly seems to take hold of circumstances at the right end.

One of the youngest of the V. C.’s of his time I used to know distantly as a beautiful being whom they called Aide-de-Camp to a big official in India. So far as strangers could judge, his duties consisted in wearing a uniform faced with blue satin, and in seeing that everyone was looked after at the dances and dinners. He would wander about smiling, with eyes at the back of his head, introducing men who were strangers and a little uncomfortable, to girls whose dance-cards were rather empty; taking old and uninteresting women into supper, and tucking them into their carriages afterwards; or pleasantly steering white-whiskered native officers all covered with medals and half-blind with confusion through the maze of a big levee into the presence of the Viceroy or Commander-in-Chief, or whoever it was they were being presented to.

After a few years of this work, his chance came, and he made the most of it. We were then smoking out a nest of caravan-raiders, slave-dealers, and general thieves who lived somewhere under the Karakoram Mountains among glaciers about sixteen thousand feet above sea level. The mere road to the place was too much for many mules, for it ran by precipices and round rock-curves and over roaring, snow-fed rivers.

The enemy—they were called Kanjuts—had fortified themselves in a place nearly as impregnable as nature and man could make it. One position was on the top of a cliff about twelve hundred feet high, whence they could roll stones directly on the head of any attacking force. Our men objected to the stones much more than to the rifle-fire. They were camped in a river-bed at the bottom of an icy pass with some three tiers of these cliff-like defences above them, and the Kanjuts on each tier were very well armed. To make all specially pleasant, it was December.

This ex-aide-de-camp happened to be a good mountaineer, and he was told off with a hundred native troops, Goorkhas and Dogra Sikhs, to climb up into the top tier of the fortifications. The only way of arriving was to follow a sort of shoot in the cliff-face which the enemy had worn smooth by throwing rocks down. Even in daylight, in peace, and with good guides, it would have been fair mountaineering.

He went up in the dark, by eye and guess, against some two thousand Kanjuts very much at war with him. When he had climbed eight hundred feet almost perpendicular he found he had to come back, because even he and his Goorkha cragsmen could find no way.

He returned to the river-bed and tried again in a new place, working his men up between avalanches of stones that slid along and knocked people over. When he struggled to the top he had to take his men into the forts with the bayonet and the kukri, the little Goorkha knife. The attack was so utterly bold and unexpected that it broke the hearts of the enemy and practically ended the campaign; and if you could see the photograph of the place you would understand why.

It was hard toenail and fingernail crag-climbing under fire, and the men behind him were not regulars, but what are called Imperial Service troops—men raised by the semi-independent kings and used to defend the frontier. They enjoyed themselves immensely, and the little aide-de-camp got a deserved Victoria Cross. The courage of Ulysses again; for he had to think as he climbed, and until he was directly underneath the fortifications, one chance-hopping boulder might just have planed his men off all along the line.

But there is a heroism beyond all, for which no Victoria Cross is ever given, because there is no official enemy nor any sort of firing, except one volley in the early morning at some spot where the noise does not echo into the newspapers.

It is necessary from time to time to send unarmed men into No Man’s Land and the Back of Beyond across the Khudajantakhan (The Lord-knows-where) Mountains, just to find out what is going on there among people who some day or other may become dangerous enemies.

The understanding is that if the men return with their reports so much the better for them. They may then receive some sort of decoration, given, so far as the public can make out, for no real reason. If they do not come back, and people disappear very mysteriously at the Back of Beyond, that is their own concern and no questions will be asked, and no enquiries made.

They tell a tale of one man who, some years ago, strayed into No Man’s Land to see how things were, and met a very amiable set of people, who asked him to a round of dinners and lunches and dances. And all that time he knew, and they knew that he knew, that his hosts were debating between themselves whether they should suffer him to live till next morning, and if they decided not to let him live, in what way they should wipe him out most quietly.

The only consideration that made them hesitate was that they could not tell from his manner whether there were five hundred Englishmen within a few miles of him or no Englishmen at all within five hundred miles of him; and, as matters stood at that moment, they could not very well go out to look and make sure.

So he danced and dined with those pleasant, merry folk,—all good friends,—and talked about hunting and shooting and so forth, never knowing when the polite servants behind his chair would turn into the firing-party. At last his hosts decided, without rude words said, to let him go; and when they made up their minds they did it very handsomely; for, you must remember, there is no malice borne on either side of that game.

They gave him a farewell banquet and drank his health, and he thanked them for his delightful visit, and they said: “So glad you’re glad—au revoir,” and he came away looking a little bored.

Later on, so the tale runs, his hosts discovered that their guest had been given up for lost by his friends in England where no one ever expected to see him again. Then they were sorry that they had not put him against a wall and shot him.

That is a case of the cold-blooded courage worked up to after years of training—courage of mind forcing the body through an unpleasant situation for the sake of the game.

When all is said and done, courage of mind is the finest thing any one can hope to attain to. A weak or undisciplined soul is apt to become reckless under strain (which is only being afraid the wrong way about), or to act for its own immediate advantage. For this reason the Victoria Cross is jealously guarded, and if there be suspicion that the man is playing to the gallery or out pot-hunting for medals, as they call it, he is often left to head his charges and rescue his wounded all over again as a guarantee of good faith.

In the Great War there was very little suspicion, or chance, of gallery-play for the V. C., because there was ample opportunity and, very often, strong necessity, for a man to repeat his performances several times over. Moreover, he was generally facing much deadlier weapons than mere single rifles or edged tools, and the rescue of wounded under fire was, by so much, a more serious business. But one or two War V. C.’s of my acquaintance have told me that if you can manage the little matter of keeping your head, it is not as difficult as it sounds to get on the blind side of a machine gun, or to lie out under its lowest line of fire where, they say, you are “quite comfortable if you don’t fuss.” Also, every V. C. of the Great War I have spoken to has been rather careful to explain that he won his Cross because what he did happened to be done when and where someone could notice it. Thousands of men they said did just the same, but in places where there were no observers. And that is true; for the real spirit of the Army changes very little through the years.

Men are taught to volunteer for anything and everything; going out quietly after, not before, the authorities have filled their place. They are also instructed that it is cowardly, it is childish, and it is cheating to neglect or scamp the plain work immediately in front of them, the duties they are trusted to do, for the sake of stepping aside to snatch at what to an outsider may resemble fame or distinction. Above all, their own hard equals, whose opinion is the sole opinion worth having, are always sitting unofficially in judgment on them.

The Order itself is a personal decoration, and the honour and glory of it belongs to the wearer; but he can only win it by forgetting himself, his own honour and glory, and by working for something beyond and outside and apart from his own self. And there seems to be no other way in which you get anything in this world worth the keeping.

THE WAY THAT HE TOOK

Almost every word of this story is based on fact. The Boer War of 1899–1902 was a very small one as wars were reckoned, and was fought without any particular malice, but it taught our men the practical value of scouting in the field. They were slow to learn at the outset, and it cost them many unnecessary losses, as is always the case when men think they can do their work without taking trouble beforehand.

The guns of the Field-Battery were ambushed behind white-thorned mimosas, scarcely taller than their wheels, that marked the line of a dry nullah; and the camp pretended to find shade under a clump of gums planted as an experiment by some Minister of Agriculture. One small hut, reddish stone with a tin roof, stood where the single track of the railway split into a siding. A rolling plain of red earth, speckled with loose stones and sugar-bush, ran northward to the scarps and spurs of a range of little hills—all barren and exaggerated in the heat-haze. Southward, the level lost itself in a tangle of scrub-furred hillocks, upheaved without purpose or order, seared and blackened by the strokes of the careless lightning, seamed down their sides with spent watercourses, and peppered from base to summit with stones—riven, piled, scattered stones. Far away, to the eastward, a line of blue-grey mountains, peaked and horned, lifted itself over the huddle of the tortured earth. It was the only thing that held steady through the liquid mirage. The nearer hills detached themselves from the plain, and swam forward like islands in a milky ocean. While the Major stared through puckered eyelids, Leviathan himself waded through the far shallows of it—a black and formless beast.

“That,” said the Major, “must be the guns coming back.” He had sent out two guns, nominally for exercise—actually to show the loyal Dutch that there was artillery near the railway if any patriot thought fit to tamper with it. Chocolate smears, looking as though they had been swept with a besom through the raffle of stones, wandered across the earth—unbridged, ungraded, unmetalled. They were the roads to the brown mud huts, one in each valley, that were officially styled farm-houses. At very long intervals a dusty Cape-cart or a tilted wagon would move along them, and men, dirtier than the dirt, would come to sell fruit or scraggy sheep. At night the farm-houses were lighted up in a style out of all keeping with Dutch economy; the scrub would light itself on some far headland, and the house-lights twinkled in reply. Three or four days later the Major would read bad news in the Capetown papers thrown to him from the passing troop trains.

The guns and their escort changed from Leviathan to the likeness of wrecked boats, their crews struggling beside them. Presently they took on their true shape, and lurched into camp amid clouds of dust.

The Mounted Infantry escort set about its evening meal; the hot air filled with the scent of burning wood; sweating men, rough-dried sweating horses with wisps of precious forage; the sun dipped behind the hills, and they heard the whistle of a train from the south.

“What’s that?” said the Major, slipping into his coat. The decencies had not yet left him.

“Ambulance train,” said the Captain of Mounted Infantry, raising his glasses. “I’d like to talk to a woman again, but it won’t stop here.... It is stopping, though, and making a beastly noise. Let’s look.”

The engine had sprung a leaky tube, and ran lamely into the siding. It would be two or three hours at least before she could be patched up.

Two doctors and a couple of Nursing Sisters stood on the rear platform of a carriage. The Major explained the situation, and invited them to tea.

“We were just going to ask you,” said the medical Major of the ambulance train.

“No, come to our camp. Let the men see a woman again!” he pleaded.

Sister Dorothy, old in the needs of war, for all her twenty-four years, gathered up a tin of biscuits and some bread and butter new cut by the orderlies. Sister Margaret picked up the tea-pot, the spirit-lamp, and a water-bottle.

“Capetown water,” she said with a nod. “Filtered too. I know Karroo water.” She jumped down lightly on to the ballast.

“What do you know about the Karroo, Sister?” said the Captain of Mounted Infantry, indulgently, as a veteran of a month’s standing. He understood that all that desert as it seemed to him was called by that name.

She laughed. “This is my home. I was born out they-ah—just behind that big range of hills—out Oudtshorn way. It’s only sixty miles from here. Oh, how good it is!”

She slipped the Nurses’ cap from her head, tossed it through the open car-window, and drew a breath of deep content. With the sinking of the sun the dry hills had taken life and glowed against the green of the horizon. They rose up like jewels in the utterly clear air, while the valleys between flooded with purple shadow. A mile away, stark-clear, withered rocks showed as though one could touch them with the hand, and the voice of a native herdboy in charge of a flock of sheep came in clear and sharp over twice that distance. Sister Margaret devoured the huge spaces with eyes unused to shorter ranges, snuffed again the air that has no equal under God’s skies, and turning to her companion, said:—“What do you think of it?”

“I am afraid I’m rather singular,” he replied. “Most of us hate the Karroo. I used to, but it grows on one somehow. I suppose it’s the lack of fences and roads that’s so fascinating. And when one gets back from the railway——”

“You’re quite right,” she said, with an emphatic stamp of her foot. “People come to Matjesfontein—ugh!—with their lungs, and they live opposite the railway station and that new hotel, and they think that’s the Karroo. They say there isn’t anything in it. It’s full of life when you really get into it. You see that? I’m so glad. D’you know, you’re the first English officer I’ve heard who has spoken a good word for my country?”

“I’m glad I pleased you,” said the Captain, looking into Sister Margaret’s black-lashed grey eyes under the heavy brown hair shot with grey where it rolled back from the tanned forehead. This kind of nurse was new in his experience. The average Sister did not lightly stride over rolling stones, and—was it possible that her easy pace uphill was beginning to pump him? As she walked, she hummed joyously to herself, a queer catchy tune of one line several times repeated:—

Vat jou goet en trek, Ferriera,

Vat jou goet en trek.

It ran off with a little trill that sounded like,

Zwaar draa, alle en de ein kant;

Jannie met de hoepel bein![^[1]]

“Listen!” she said, suddenly. “What was that?”

“It must be a wagon on the road. I heard the whip, I think.”

“Yes, but you didn’t hear the wheels, did you? It’s a little bird that makes just that noise. ‘Whe-ew’!” she duplicated it perfectly. “We call it”—she gave the Dutch name, which did not, of course, abide with the Captain. “We must have given him a scare! You hear him in the early mornings when you are sleeping in the wagons. It’s just like the noise of a whiplash, isn’t it?”

They entered the Major’s tent a little behind the others, who were discussing the scanty news of the Campaign.

“Oh, no,” said Sister Margaret coolly, bending over the spirit-lamp, “the Transvaalers will stay round Kimberley and try to put Rhodes in a cage. But, of course, if a commando gets through to De Aar they will all rise——”

“You think so, Sister?” said the medical Major, deferentially.

“I know so. They will rise anywhere in the Colony if a commando comes actually to them. Presently they will rise in Prieska—if it is only to steal the forage at Van Wyk’s Vlei. Why not?”

“We get most of our opinions of the war from Sister Margaret,” said the civilian doctor of the train. “It’s all new to me, but, so far, all her prophecies have come true.”

A few months ago that doctor had retired from practice to a country house in rainy England, his fortune made and, as he tried to believe, his life-work done. Then the bugles blew, and, rejoicing at the change, he found himself, his experience, and his fine bedside manner, buttoned up in a black-tabbed khaki coat, on a hospital train that covered eleven hundred miles a week, carried a hundred wounded each trip and dealt him more experience in a month than he had ever gained in a year of home practice.

Sister Margaret and the Captain of Mounted Infantry took their cups outside the tent. The Captain wished to know something more about her. Till that day he had believed South Africa to be populated by sullen Dutchmen and slack-waisted women; and in some clumsy fashion betrayed the belief.

“Of course, you don’t see any others where you are,” said Sister Margaret, leniently, from her camp-chair. “They are all at the war. I have two brothers, and a nephew, my sister’s son, and—oh, I can’t count my cousins.” She flung her hands outward with a curiously un-English gesture. “And then, too, you have never been off the railway. You have only seen Capetown? All the schel—all the useless people are there. You should see our country beyond the ranges—out Oudtshorn way. We grow fruit and vines. It is much prettier, I think, than Paarl.”

“I’d like to very much. I may be stationed in Africa after the war is over.”

“Ah, but we know the English officers. They say that this is a ‘beastly country,’ and they do not know how to—to be nice to people. Shall I tell you? There was an aide-de-camp at Government House three years ago. He sent out invitations to dinner to Piet—to Mr. Van der Hooven’s wife. And she had been dead eight years, and Van der Hooven—he has the big farms round Craddock—just then was thinking of changing his politics, you see—he was against the Government,—and taking a house in Capetown, because of the Army meat contracts. That was why, you see?”

“I see,” said the Captain, to whom this was all Greek.

“Piet was a little angry—not much—but he went to Capetown, and that aide-de-camp had made a joke about it—about inviting the dead woman—in the Civil Service Club. You see? So of course the opposition there told Van der Hooven that the aide-de-camp had said he could not remember all the old Dutch vrows that had died, and so Piet Van der Hooven went away angry, and now he is more hot than ever against the Government. If you stay with us you must not be like that. You see?”

“I won’t,” said the Captain, seriously. “What a night it is, Sister!” He dwelt lovingly on the last word, as men did in South Africa.

The soft darkness had shut upon them unawares and the world had vanished. There was not so much breeze as a slow motion of the whole dry air under the vault of the immeasurably deep heavens. “Look up,” said the Captain; “doesn’t it make you feel as if we were tumbling down into the stars—all upside down?”

“Yes,” said Sister Margaret, tilting her head back. “It is always like that. I know. And those are our stars.”

They burned with a great glory, large as the eyes of cattle by lamp-light; planet after planet of the mild Southern sky. As the Captain said, one seemed to be falling from out the hidden earth sheer through space, between them.

“Now, when I was little,” Sister Margaret began very softly, “there was one day in the week at home that was all our own. We could get up as soon as we liked after midnight, and there was the basket in the kitchen—our food. We used to go out at three o’clock sometimes, my two brothers, my sisters, and the two little ones—out into the Karroo for all the day. All—the—long—day. First we built a fire, and then we made a kraal for the two little ones—a kraal of thorn bushes so that they should not be bitten by anything. You see? Often we made the kraal before morning—when those”—she jerked her firm chin at the stars—“were just going out. Then we old ones went hunting lizards—and snakes and birds and centipedes, and all that sort of nice thing. Our father collected them. He gave us half-a-crown for a spuugh-slange—a kind of snake. You see?”

“How old were you?” Snake-hunting did not strike the Captain as a safe amusement for the young.

“I was eleven then—or ten, perhaps, and the little ones were two and three. Why? Then we came back to eat, and we sat under a rock all afternoon. It was hot, you see, and we played—we played with the stones and the flowers. You should see our Karroo in spring! All flowers! All our flowers! Then we came home, carrying the little ones on our backs asleep—came home through the dark—just like this night. That was our own day! Oh, the good days! We used to watch the meer-cats playing, too, and the little buck. When I was at Guy’s, learning to nurse how home-sick that made me!”

“But what a splendid open-air life!” said the Captain.

“Where else is there to live except the open air?” said Sister Margaret, looking off into twenty thousand square miles of it with eyes that burned.

“You’re quite right.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt you two,” said Sister Dorothy, who had been talking to the gunner Major; “but the guard says we shall be ready to go in a few minutes. Major Devine and Dr. Johnson have gone down already.”

“Very good, Sister. We’ll follow.” The Captain rose unwillingly and made for the worn path from the camp to the rail.

“Isn’t there another way?” said Sister Margaret. Her grey nursing gown glimmered like some big moth’s wing.

“No. I’ll bring a lantern. It’s quite safe.”

“I did not think of that,” she said with a laugh; “only we never come home by the way we left it when we live in the Karroo. If any one—suppose you had dismissed a Kaffir, or got him sjamboked,[^[2]] and he saw you go out? He would wait for you to come back on a tired horse, and then.... You see? But, of course, in England where the road is all walled, it is different. How funny! Even when we were little we learned never to come home the way we went out.”

“Very good,” said the Captain, obediently. It made the walk longer, and he approved of that.

“That’s a curious sort of woman,” said the Captain to the Major, as they smoked a lonely pipe together when the train had gone.

“You seemed to think so.”

“Well—I couldn’t monopolize Sister Dorothy in the presence of my senior officer. What was she like?”

“Oh, it came out that she knew a lot of my people in London. She’s the daughter of a chap in the next county to us, too.”

The General’s flag still flew before his unstruck tent to amuse Boer binoculars, and loyal lying correspondents still telegraphed accounts of his daily work. But the General himself had gone to join an army a hundred miles away; drawing off from time to time every squadron, gun and company that he dared. His last words to the few troops he left behind covered the entire situation.

“If you can bluff ’em till we get round up north to tread on their tails, it’s all right. If you can’t, they’ll probably eat you up. Hold ’em as long as you can.”

So the skeleton remnant of the brigade lay close among the kopjes till the Boers, not seeing them in force on the sky-line, feared that they might have learned the rudiments of war. They rarely disclosed a gun, for the reason that they had so few; they scouted by fours and fives instead of clattering troops and chattering companies, and where they saw a too obvious way opened to attack they, lacking force to drive it home, looked elsewhere. Great was the anger in the Boer commando across the river—the anger and unease.

“The reason is they have so few men,” the loyal farmers reported, all fresh from selling melons to the camp, and drinking Queen Victoria’s health in good whisky. “They have no horses—only what they call Mounted Infantry. They are afraid of us. They try to make us friends by giving us brandy. Come on and shoot them. Then you will see us rise and cut the line.”

“Yes, we know how you rise, you Colonials,” said the Boer commandant above his pipe. “We know what has come to all your promises from Beaufort West, and even from De Aar. We do the work—all the work,—and you kneel down with your parsons and pray for our success. What good is that? The President has told you a hundred times God is on our side. Why do you worry Him? We did not send you Mausers and ammunition for that.”

“We kept our commando-horses ready for six months—and forage is very dear. We sent all our young men,” said an honoured member of local society.

“A few here and a few servants there. What is that? You should have risen down to the sea all together.”

“But you were so quick. Why did not you wait the year? We were not ready, Jan.”

“That is a lie. All you Cape people lie. You want to save your cattle and your farms. Wait till our flag flies from here to Port Elizabeth and you shall see what you will save when the President learns how you have risen—you clever Cape people.”

The saddle-coloured sons of the soil looked down their noses. “Yes—it is true. Some of our farms are close to the line. They say at Worcester and in the Paarl that many soldiers are always coming in from the sea. One must think of that—at least till they are shot. But we know there are very few in front of you here. Give them what you gave the fools at Stormberg, and you will see how we can shoot rooineks.”[^[3]]

“Yes. I know that cow. She is always going to calve. Get away. I am answerable to the President—not to the Cape.”

But the information stayed in his mind, and, not being a student of military works, he made a plan to suit. The tall kopje on which the English had planted their helio-station commanded the more or less open plain to the northward, but did not command the five-mile belt of broken country between that and the outmost English pickets, some three miles from camp. The Boers had established themselves very comfortably among these rock-ridges and scrub-patches, and the “great war” drizzled down to long shots and longer stalking. The young bloods wanted rooineks to shoot, and said so.

“See here,” quoth the experienced Jan van Staden that evening to as many of his commando as cared to listen. “You youngsters from the Colony talk a lot. Go and turn the rooineks out of their kopjes to-night. Eh? Go and take their bayonets from them and stick them into them. Eh? You don’t go!” He laughed at the silence round the fire.

“Jan—Jan,” said one young man appealingly, “don’t make mock of us.”

“I thought that was what you wanted so badly. No? Then listen to me. Behind us the grazing is bad. We have too many cattle here.” (They had been stolen from farmers who had been heard to express fears of defeat.) “To-morrow, by the sky’s look, it will blow a good wind. So, to-morrow early I shall send all our cattle north to the new grazing. That will make a great dust for the English to see from their helio yonder.” He pointed to a winking night-lamp stabbing the darkness with orders to an out-lying picket. “With the cattle we will send all our women. Yes, all the women and the wagons we can spare, and the lame ponies and the broken carts we took from Andersen’s farm. That will make a big dust—the dust of our retreat. Do you see?”

They saw and approved, and said so.

“Good. There are many men here who want to go home to their wives. I shall let thirty of them away for a week. Men who wish to do this will speak to me to-night.” (This meant that Jan needed money, and furlough would be granted on strictly business lines.) “These men will look after the cattle and see that they make a great dust for a long way. They will run about behind the cattle showing their guns, too. So that, if the wind blows well, will be our retreat. The cattle will feed beyond Koopman’s Kop.”

“No good water there,” growled a farmer who knew that section. “Better go on to Zwartpan. It is always sweet at Zwartpan.”

The commando discussed the point for twenty minutes. It was much more serious than shooting rooineks. Then Jan went on:

“When the rooineks see our retreat they may all come into our kopjes together. If so, good. But it is tempting God to expect such a favour. I think they will first send some men to scout.” He grinned broadly, using the English word. “Almighty! To scoot! They have none of that new sort of rooinek that they used at Sunnyside.” (Jan meant an incomprehensible animal from a place called Australia across the Southern seas who played what they knew of the war-game to kill.) “They have only some Mounted Infantry,”—again he used the English words. “They were once a Red-jacket regiment, so their scoots will stand up bravely to be shot at.”

“Good—good, we will shoot them,” said a youngster from Stellenbosch, who had come up on free pass as a Capetown excursionist just before the war to a farm on the border, where his aunt was taking care of his horse and rifle.

“But if you shoot their scoots I will sjambok you myself,” said Jan, amid roars of laughter. “We must let them all come into the kopjes to look for us; and I pray God will not allow any of us to be tempted to shoot them. They will cross the ford in front of their camp. They will come along the road—so!” He imitated with ponderous arms the Army style of riding. “They will trot up the road this way and that way”—here he snaked his hard finger in the dust—“between kopjes, till they come here, where they can see the plain and all our cattle going away. Then they will all come in close together. Perhaps they will even fix their bayonets. We shall be up here behind the rock—there and there.” He pointed to two flat-topped kopjes, one on either side of the road, some eight hundred yards away. “That is our place. We will go there before sunrise. Remember we must be careful to let the very last of the rooineks pass before we begin shooting. They will come along a little careful at first. But we do not shoot. Then they will see our fires and the fresh horse-dung, so they will know we have gone on. They will run together and talk and point and shout in this nice open place. Then we begin shooting them from above.”

“Yes, uncle, but if the scouts see nothing and there are no shots and we let them go back quite quiet, they will think it was a trick. Perhaps the main body may never come here at all. Even rooineks learn in time—and so we may lose even the scouts.”

“I have thought of that too,” said Jan, with slow contempt, as the Stellenbosch boy delivered his shot. “If you had been my son I should have sjamboked you more when you were a youngster. I shall put you and four or five more on the Nek [the pass], where the road comes from their camp into these kopjes. You go there before it is light. Let the scoots pass in or I will sjambok you myself. When the scoots come back after seeing nothing here, then you may shoot them, but not till they have passed the Nek and are on the straight road to their camp again. Do you understand? Repeat what I have said, so that I shall know.”

The youth obediently repeated his orders.

“Kill their officers if you can. If not, no great matter, because the scoots will run to camp with the news that our kopjes are empty. Their helio-station will see your party trying to hold the Nek so hard—and all that time they will see our dust out yonder, and they will think you are the rear-guard, and they will think we are escaping. They will be angry.”

“Yes—yes, uncle, we see,” from a dozen elderly voices.

“But this calf does not. Be silent! They will shoot at you, Niclaus, on the Nek, because they will think you are to cover our getting away. They will shell the Nek. They will miss. You will then ride away. All the rooineks will come after you, hot and in a hurry—perhaps, even, with their cannon. They will pass our fires and our fresh horse-dung. They will come here as their scoots came. They will see the plain so full of our dust. They will say, ‘The scoots spoke truth. It is a full retreat.’ Then we up there on the rocks will shoot, and it will be like the fight at Stormberg in daytime. Do you understand now?”

Those of the commando directly interested lit new pipes and discussed the matter in detail till midnight.

Next morning the operations began with, if one may borrow the language of some official despatches—“the precision of well-oiled machinery.”

The helio-station reported the dust of the wagons and the movements of armed men in full flight across the plain beyond the kopjes. A Colonel, newly appointed from England, by reason of his seniority, sent forth a dozen Mounted Infantry under command of a Captain. Till a month ago they had been drilled by a cavalry instructor, who taught them “shock” tactics to the music of trumpets. They knew how to advance in echelon of squadrons, by cat’s cradle of troops, in quarter column of stable-litter, how to trot, to gallop, and above all to charge. They knew how to sit their horses unremittingly, so that at the day’s end they might boast how many hours they had been in the saddle without relief, and they learned to rejoice in the clatter and stamp of a troop moving as such, and therefore audible five miles away.

They trotted out two and two along the farm road, that trailed lazily through the wind-driven dust; across the half-dried ford to a nek between low stony hills leading into the debatable land. (Vrooman of Emmaus from his neatly bushed hole noted that one man carried a sporting Lee-Enfield rifle with a short fore-end. Vrooman of Emmaus argued that the owner of it was the officer to be killed on his return, and went to sleep.) They saw nothing except a small flock of sheep and a Kaffir herdsman who spoke broken English with curious fluency. He had heard that the Boers had decided to retreat on account of their sick and wounded. The Captain in charge of the detachment turned to look at the helio-station four miles away. “Hurry up,” said the dazzling flash. “Retreat apparently continues, but suggest you make sure. Quick.”

“Ye-es,” said the Captain, a shade bitterly, as he wiped the sweat from a sun-skinned nose. “You want me to come back and report all clear. If anything happens it will be my fault. If they get away it will be my fault for disregarding the signal. I love officers who suggest and advise, and want to make their reputations in twenty minutes.”

“’Don’t see much ’ere, sir,” said the sergeant, scanning the bare cup of the hollow where a dust-devil danced alone.

“No? We’ll go on.”

“If we get among these steep ’ills we lose touch of the ’elio.”

“Very likely. Trot.”

The rounded mounds grew to spiked kopjes, heart-breaking to climb under a hot sun at four thousand feet above sea level. This is where the scouts found their spurs peculiarly useful.

Jan van Staden had thoughtfully allowed the invading force a front of two rifle-shots or four thousand yards, and they kept a thousand yards within his estimate. Ten men strung over two miles feel that they have explored all the round earth.

They saw stony slopes combing over in scrub, narrow valleys clothed with stone, low ridges of splintered stone, and tufts of brittle-stemmed bush. An irritating wind, split up by many rocky barriers, cuffed them over the ears and slapped them in the face at every turn. They came upon an abandoned camp fire, a little fresh horse-dung, and an empty ammunition-box splintered up for fire-wood, an old boot, and a stale bandage.

A few hundred yards farther along the road a battered Mauser had been thrown into a bush. The glimmer of its barrel drew the scouts from the hillside, and here the road after passing between two flat-topped kopjes entered a valley nearly half a mile wide, rose slightly, and over the nek of a ridge gave clear view across the windy plain northward.

“They’re on the dead run, for sure,” said a trooper. “Here’s their fire and their litter and their guns, and that’s where they’re bolting to.” He pointed over the ridge to the bellying dust cloud a mile long. A vulture high overhead flickered down, steadied herself, and hung motionless.

“See!” said Jan van Staden from the rocks above the road, to his waiting commando. “It turns like a well-oiled wheel. They look where they need not look, but here, where they should look on both sides, they look at our retreat—straight before them. It is tempting our people too much. I pray God no one will shoot them.”

“That’s about the size of it,” said the Captain, rubbing the dust from his binoculars. “Boers on the run. I expect they find their main line of retreat to the north is threatened. We’ll get back and tell the camp.” He wheeled his pony and his eye traversed the flat-topped kopje commanding the road. The stones at its edge seemed to be piled with less than Nature’s carelessness.

“That ’ud be a dashed ugly place if it were occupied—and that other one, too. Those rocks aren’t five hundred yards from the road, either of ’em. Hold on, sergeant, I’ll light a pipe.” He bent over the bowl, and above his lighted match squinted at the kopje. A stone, a small roundish brown boulder on the lip of another one, seemed to move very slightly. The short hairs of his neck grated his collar. “I’ll have another squint at their retreat,” he cried to the sergeant, astonished at the steadiness of his own voice. He swept the plain, and, wheeling, let the glass rest for a moment on the kopje’s top. One cranny between the rocks was pinkish, where blue sky should have shown. His men, dotted down the valley, sat heavily on their horses—it never occurred to them to dismount. He could hear the squeak of the leathers as a man shifted. An impatient gust blew through the valley and rattled the bushes. On all sides the expectant hills stood still under the pale blue.

“And we passed within a quarter of a mile of ’em! We’re done!” The thumping heart slowed down, and the Captain began to think clearly—so clearly that the thoughts seemed solid things. “It’s Pretoria gaol for us all. Perhaps that man’s only a look-out, though. We’ll have to bolt! And I led ’em into it!... You fool,” said his other self, above the beat of the blood in his eardrums. “If they could snipe you all from up there, why haven’t they begun already? Because you’re the bait for the rest of the attack. They don’t want you now. You’re to go back and bring up the others to be killed. Go back! Don’t detach a man or they’ll suspect. Go back all together. Tell the sergeant you’re going. Some of them up there will understand English. Tell it aloud! Then back you go with the news—the real news.”

“The country’s all clear, sergeant,” he shouted. “We’ll go back and tell the Colonel.” With an idiotic giggle he added, “It’s a good road for guns, don’t you think?”

“Hear you that?” said Jan van Staden, gripping a burgher’s arm. “God is on our side to-day. They will bring their little cannons after all!”

“Go easy. No good bucketing the horses to pieces. We’ll need ’em for the pursuit later,” said the Captain. “Hullo, there’s a vulture! How far would you make him?”

“Can’t tell, sir, in this dry air.”

The bird swooped towards the second flat-topped kopje, but suddenly shivered sideways, and wheeled off again, followed intently by the Captain’s glance.

“And that kopje’s simply full of ’em, too,” he said, flushing. “Perfectly confident they are, that we’d take this road—and then they’ll scupper the whole boiling of us! They’ll let us through to fetch up the others. But I mustn’t let ’em know we know. By Jove, they do not think much of us! ’Don’t blame ’em.”

The cunning of the trap did not impress him until later.

Down the track jolted a dozen well-equipped men, laughing and talking—a mark to make a pious burgher’s mouth water. Thrice had their Captain explicitly said that they were to march easy, so a trooper began to hum a tune that he had picked up in Capetown streets:—

Vat jou goet en trek, Ferriera,

Vat jou goet en trek;

Jannie met de hoepel bein, Ferriera,

Jannie met de hoepel bein!

Then with a whistle:—

Zwaar draa—alle en de ein kant—

The Captain, thinking furiously, found his mind turn to a camp in the Karroo, months before; an engine that had halted in that waste, and a woman with brown hair, early grizzled—an extraordinary woman.... Yes, but as soon as they had dropped the flat-topped kopje behind its neighbour he must hurry back and report.... A woman with grey eyes and black eyelashes.... The Boers would probably be massed on those two kopjes. How soon dare he break into a canter?... A woman with a queer cadence in her speech.... It was not more than five miles home by the straight road—

“Even when we were children we learned not to go back by the way we had come.”

The sentence came back to him, self-shouted, so clearly that he almost turned to see if the scouts had heard. The two flat-topped kopjes behind him were covered by a long ridge. The camp lay due south. He had only to follow the road to the Nek—a notch, unscouted as he recalled now, between the two hills.

He wheeled his men up a long valley.

“Excuse me, sir, that ain’t our road!” said the sergeant. “Once we get over this rise, straight on, we come into direct touch with the ’elio, on that flat bit o’ road there they ’elioed us goin’ out.”

“But we aren’t going to get in touch with them just now. Come along, and come quick.”

“What’s the meaning of this?” said a private in the rear. “What’s ’e doin’ this detour for? We shan’t get in for hours an’ hours.”