I had seen some stimulating6 things during those four months of actual warfare7, a hundred intense impressions of death, wounds, anger, patience, brutality8, courage, generosity9 and wasteful10 destruction—above all, wasteful destruction—to correct the easy optimistic patriotism11 of my university days. There is a depression in the opening stages of fever and a feebleness in a convalescence12 on a starvation diet that leads men to broad and sober views. (Heavens! how I hated the horse extract—'chevril' we called it—that served us for beef tea.) When I came down from Ladysmith to the sea to pick up my strength I had not an illusion left about the serene13, divinely appointed empire of the English. But if I had less national conceit15, I had certainly more patriotic16 determination. That grew with every day of returning health. The reality of this war had got hold of my imagination, as indeed for a time it got hold of the English imagination altogether, and I was now almost fiercely keen to learn and do. At the first chance I returned to active service, and now I was no longer a disconsolate17 lover taking war for a cure, but an earnest, and I think reasonably able, young officer, very alert for chances.
I got those chances soon enough. I rejoined our men beyond Kimberley, on the way to Mafeking,—we were the extreme British left in the advance upon Pretoria—and I rode with Mahon and was ambushed18 with him in a little affair beyond Koodoosrand. It was a sudden brisk encounter. We got fired into at close quarters, but we knew our work by that time, and charged home and brought in a handful of prisoners to make up for the men we had lost. A few days later we came into the flattened19 ruins of the quaintest20 siege in history....
Three days after we relieved Mafeking I had the luck to catch one of Snyman's retreating guns rather easily, the only big gun that was taken at Mafeking. I came upon it unexpectedly with about twenty men, spotted21 a clump22 of brush four hundred yards ahead, galloped23 into it before the Boers realized the boldness of our game, shot all the draught24 oxen while they hesitated, and held them up until Chambers25 arrived on the scene. The incident got perhaps a disproportionate share of attention in the papers at home, because of the way in which Mafeking had been kept in focus. I was mentioned twice again in despatches before we rode across to join Roberts in Pretoria and see what we believed to be the end of the war. We were too late to go on up to Komatipoort, and had some rather blank and troublesome work on the north side of the town. That was indeed the end of the great war; the rest was a struggle with guerillas.
Everyone thought things were altogether over. I wrote to my father discussing the probable date of my return. But there were great chances still to come for an active young officer; the guerilla war was to prolong the struggle yet for a whole laborious26, eventful year, and I was to make the most of those later opportunities....
Those years in South Africa are stuck into my mind like—like those pink colored pages about something else one finds at times in a railway Indicateur. Chance had put this work in my way, and started me upon it with a reputation that wasn't altogether deserved, and I found I could only live up to it and get things done well by a fixed27 and extreme concentration of my attention. But the whole business was so interesting that I found it possible to make that concentration. Essentially28 warfare is a game of elaborate but witty29 problems in precaution and anticipation30, with amazing scope for invention. You so saturate31 your mind with the facts and possibilities of the situation that intuitions emerge. It did not do to think of anything beyond those facts and possibilities and dodges32 and counterdodges, for to do so was to let in irrelevant33 and distracting lights. During all that concluding year of service I was not so much myself as a forced and artificial thing I made out of myself to meet the special needs of the time. I became a Boer-outwitting animal. When I was tired of this specialized34 thinking, then the best relief, I found, was some quite trivial occupation—playing poker35, yelling in the chorus of some interminable song one of the men would sing, or coining South African Limericks or playing burlesque36 bouts-rimés with Fred Maxim37, who was then my second in command....
Yet occasionally thought overtook me. I remember lying one night out upon a huge dark hillside, in a melancholy38 wilderness39 of rock-ribbed hills, waiting for one of the flying commandoes that were breaking northward from Cape40 Colony towards the Orange River in front of Colonel Eustace. We had been riding all day, I was taking risks in what I was doing, and there is something very cheerless in a fireless bivouac. My mind became uncontrollably active.
It was a clear, still night. The young moon set early in a glow of white that threw the jagged contours of a hill to the south-east into strange, weird41 prominence42. The patches of moonshine evaporated from the summits of the nearer hills, and left them hard and dark. Then there was nothing but a great soft black darkness below that jagged edge and above it the stars very large and bright. Somewhere under that enormous serenity43 to the south of us the hunted Boers must be halting to snatch an hour or so of rest, and beyond them again extended the long thin net of the pursuing British. It all seemed infinitely44 small and remote, there was no sound of it, no hint of it, no searchlight at work, no faintest streamer of smoke nor the reflection of a solitary45 fire in the sky....
All this business that had held my mind so long was reduced to insignificance46 between the blackness of the hills and the greatness of the sky; a little trouble, it seemed of no importance under the Southern Cross. And I fell wondering, as I had not wondered for long, at the forces that had brought me to this occupation and the strangeness of this game of war which had filled the minds and tempered the spirit of a quarter of a million of men for two hard-living years.
I fell thinking of the dead.
No soldier in a proper state of mind ever thinks of the dead. At times of course one suspects, one catches a man glancing at the pair of boots sticking out stiffly from under a blanket, but at once he speaks of other things. Nevertheless some suppressed part of my being had been stirring up ugly and monstrous47 memories, of distortion, disfigurement, torment48 and decay, of dead men in stained and ragged49 clothes, with their sole-worn boots drawn50 up under them, of the blood trail of a dying man who had crawled up to a dead comrade rather than die alone, of Kaffirs heaping limp, pitiful bodies together for burial, of the voices of inaccessible51 wounded in the rain on Waggon52 Hill crying in the night, of a heap of men we found in a donga three days dead, of the dumb agony of shell-torn horses, and the vast distressful53 litter and heavy brooding stench, the cans and cartridge-cases and filth54 and bloody55 rags of a shelled and captured laager. I will confess I have never lost my horror of dead bodies; they are dreadful to me—dreadful. I dread56 their stiff attitudes, their terrible intent inattention. To this day such memories haunt me. That night they nearly overwhelmed me.... I thought of the grim silence of the surgeon's tent, the miseries57 and disordered ravings of the fever hospital, of the midnight burial of a journalist at Ladysmith with the distant searchlight on Bulwana flicking58 suddenly upon our faces and making the coffin59 shine silver white. What a vast trail of destruction South Africa had become! I thought of the black scorched60 stones of burnt and abandoned farms, of wretched natives we had found shot like dogs and flung aside, rottenly amazed, decaying in infinite indignity61; of stories of treachery and fierce revenges sweeping62 along in the trail of the greater fighting. I knew too well of certain atrocities,—one had to believe them incredibly stupid to escape the conviction that they were incredibly evil.
For a time my mind could make no headway against its monstrous assemblage of horror. There was something in that jagged black hill against the moonshine and the gigantic basin of darkness out of which it rose that seemed to gather all these gaunt and grisly effects into one appalling63 heap of agonizing64 futility65. That rock rose up and crouched66 like something that broods and watches.
I remember I sat up in the darkness staring at it.
I found myself murmuring: "Get the proportions of things, get the proportions of things!" I had an absurd impression of a duel67 between myself and the cavernous antagonism68 of the huge black spaces below me. I argued that all this pain and waste was no more than the selvedge of a proportionately limitless fabric69 of sane70, interested, impassioned and joyous71 living. These stiff still memories seemed to refute me. But why us? they seemed to insist. In some way it's essential,—this margin72. I stopped at that.
"If all this pain, waste, violence, anguish73 is essential to life, why does my spirit rise against it? What is wrong with me?" I got from that into a corner of self-examination. Did I respond overmuch to these painful aspects in life? When I was a boy I had never had the spirit even to kill rats. Siddons came into the meditation74, Siddons, the essential Englishman, a little scornful, throwing out contemptuous phrases. Soft! Was I a soft? What was a soft? Something not rough, not hearty75 and bloody! I felt I had to own to the word—after years of resistance. A dreadful thing it is when a great empire has to rely upon soft soldiers.
Was civilization breeding a type of human being too tender to go on living? I stuck for a time as one does on these nocturnal occasions at the word "hypersensitive," going round it and about it....
I do not know now how it was that I passed from a mood so darkened and sunless to one of exceptional exaltation, but I recall very clearly that I did. I believe that I made a crowning effort against this despair and horror that had found me out in the darkness and overcome. I cried in my heart for help, as a lost child cries, to God. I seem to remember a rush of impassioned prayer, not only for myself, not chiefly for myself, but for all those smashed and soiled and spoilt and battered76 residues77 of men whose memories tormented78 me. I prayed to God that they had not lived in vain, that particularly those poor Kaffir scouts79 might not have lived in vain. "They are like children," I said. "It was a murder of children.... By children!"
My horror passed insensibly. I have to feel the dreadfulness of these things, I told myself, because it is good for such a creature as I to feel them dreadful, but if one understood it would all be simple. Not dreadful at all. I clung to that and repeated it,—"it would all be perfectly80 simple." It would come out no more horrible than the things that used to frighten me as a child,—the shadow on the stairs, the white moonrise reflected on a barked and withered81 tree, a peculiar82 dream of moving geometrical forms, an ugly illustration in the "Arabian Nights." ...
I do not know how long I wrestled83 with God and prayed that night, but abruptly84 the shadows broke; and very suddenly and swiftly my spirit seemed to flame up into space like some white beacon85 that is set alight. Everything became light and clear and confident. I was assured that all was well with us, with us who lived and fought and with the dead who rotted now in fifty thousand hasty graves....
For a long time it seemed I was repeating again and again with soundless lips and finding the deepest comfort in my words:—"And out of our agonies comes victory, out of our agonies comes victory! Have pity on us, God our Father!"
I think that mood passed quite insensibly from waking to a kind of clear dreaming. I have an impression that I fell asleep and was aroused by a gun. Yet I was certainly still sitting up when I heard that gun.
I was astonished to find things darkly visible about me. I had not noted86 that the stars were growing pale until the sound of this gun very far away called my mind back to the grooves87 in which it was now accustomed to move. I started into absolute wakefulness. A gun?...
I found myself trying to see my watch.
I heard a slipping and clatter89 of pebbles90 near me, and discovered Fred Maxim at my side. "Look!" he said, hoarse91 with excitement. "Already!" He pointed14 to a string of dim little figures galloping92 helter-skelter over the neck and down the gap in the hills towards us.
They came up against the pale western sky, little nodding swaying black dots, and flashed over and were lost in the misty93 purple groove88 towards us. They must have been riding through the night—the British following. To them we were invisible. Behind us was the shining east, we were in a shadow still too dark to betray us.
In a moment I was afoot and called out to the men, my philosophy, my deep questionings, all torn out of my mind like a page of scribbled94 poetry plucked out of a business note-book. Khaki figures were up all about me passing the word and hurrying to their places. All the dispositions95 I had made overnight came back clear and sharp into my mind. We hadn't long for preparations....
It seems now there were only a few busy moments before the fighting began. It must have been much longer in reality. By that time we had seen their gun come over and a train of carts. They were blundering right into us. Every moment it was getting lighter96, and the moment of contact nearer. Then "Crack!" from down below among the rocks, and there was a sudden stoppage of the trail of dark shapes upon the hillside. "Crack!" came a shot from our extreme left. I damned the impatient men who had shot away the secret of our presence. But we had to keep them at a shooting distance. Would the Boers have the wit to charge through us before the daylight came, or should we hold them? I had a swift, disturbing idea. Would they try a bolt across our front to the left? Had we extended far enough across the deep valley to our left? But they'd hesitate on account of their gun. The gun couldn't go that way because of the gullies and thickets97.... But suppose they tried it! I hung between momentous98 decisions....
Then all up the dim hillside I could make out the Boers halting and riding back. One rifle across there flashed.
We held them!...
We had begun the fight of Pieters Nek which ended before midday with the surrender of Simon Botha and over seven hundred men. It was the crown of all my soldiering.
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1
consecutive
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| adj.连续的，联贯的，始终一贯的 | |
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scout
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| n.童子军，侦察员；v.侦察，搜索 | |
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sergeant
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| n.警官，中士 | |
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technically
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| adv.专门地，技术上地 | |
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northward
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| adv.向北；n.北方的地区 | |
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6
stimulating
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| adj.有启发性的，能激发人思考的 | |
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warfare
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| n.战争(状态)；斗争；冲突 | |
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brutality
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| n.野蛮的行为，残忍，野蛮 | |
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generosity
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| n.大度，慷慨，慷慨的行为 | |
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wasteful
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| adj.（造成）浪费的，挥霍的 | |
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patriotism
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| n.爱国精神，爱国心，爱国主义 | |
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convalescence
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| n.病后康复期 | |
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serene
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| adj. 安详的，宁静的，平静的 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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conceit
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| n.自负，自高自大 | |
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patriotic
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| adj.爱国的，有爱国心的 | |
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17
disconsolate
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| adj.忧郁的，不快的 | |
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ambushed
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| v.埋伏( ambush的过去式和过去分词 )；埋伏着 | |
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flattened
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| [医]（水）平扁的，弄平的 | |
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quaintest
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| adj.古色古香的( quaint的最高级 )；少见的，古怪的 | |
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spotted
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| adj.有斑点的，斑纹的，弄污了的 | |
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clump
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| n.树丛，草丛；vi.用沉重的脚步行走 | |
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galloped
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| （使马）飞奔，奔驰( gallop的过去式和过去分词 )； 快速做[说]某事 | |
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draught
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| n.拉，牵引，拖；一网（饮，吸，阵)；顿服药量，通风；v.起草，设计 | |
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chambers
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| n.房间( chamber的名词复数 )；（议会的）议院；卧室；会议厅 | |
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laborious
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| adj.吃力的，努力的，不流畅 | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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essentially
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| adv.本质上，实质上，基本上 | |
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witty
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| adj.机智的，风趣的 | |
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anticipation
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| n.预期，预料，期望 | |
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saturate
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| vt.使湿透，浸透；使充满，使饱和 | |
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dodges
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| n.闪躲( dodge的名词复数 )；躲避；伎俩；妙计v.闪躲( dodge的第三人称单数 )；回避 | |
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irrelevant
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| adj.不恰当的，无关系的，不相干的 | |
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specialized
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| adj.专门的，专业化的 | |
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poker
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| n.扑克；vt.烙制 | |
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burlesque
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| v.嘲弄，戏仿；n.嘲弄，取笑，滑稽模仿 | |
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maxim
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| n.格言，箴言 | |
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melancholy
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| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
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wilderness
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| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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cape
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| n.海角，岬；披肩，短披风 | |
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weird
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| adj.古怪的，离奇的；怪诞的，神秘而可怕的 | |
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42
prominence
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| n.突出；显著；杰出；重要 | |
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43
serenity
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| n.宁静，沉着，晴朗 | |
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infinitely
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| adv.无限地，无穷地 | |
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solitary
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| adj.孤独的，独立的，荒凉的；n.隐士 | |
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46
insignificance
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| n.不重要；无价值；无意义 | |
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47
monstrous
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| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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48
torment
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| n.折磨；令人痛苦的东西(人)；vt.折磨；纠缠 | |
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49
ragged
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| adj.衣衫褴褛的，粗糙的，刺耳的 | |
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50
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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51
inaccessible
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| adj.达不到的，难接近的 | |
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52
waggon
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| n.运货马车，运货车；敞篷车箱 | |
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53
distressful
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| adj.苦难重重的，不幸的，使苦恼的 | |
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54
filth
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| n.肮脏，污物，污秽；淫猥 | |
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55
bloody
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| adj.非常的的；流血的；残忍的；adv.很；vt.血染 | |
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dread
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| vt.担忧，忧虑；惧怕，不敢；n.担忧，畏惧 | |
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57
miseries
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| n.痛苦( misery的名词复数 )；痛苦的事；穷困；常发牢骚的人 | |
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58
flicking
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| （尤指用手指或手快速地）轻击( flick的现在分词 )； （用…）轻挥； （快速地）按开关； 向…笑了一下（或瞥了一眼等） | |
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coffin
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| n.棺材，灵柩 | |
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scorched
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| 烧焦，烤焦( scorch的过去式和过去分词 )； 使（植物）枯萎，把…晒枯； 高速行驶； 枯焦 | |
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indignity
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| n.侮辱，伤害尊严，轻蔑 | |
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sweeping
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| adj.范围广大的，一扫无遗的 | |
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appalling
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| adj.骇人听闻的，令人震惊的，可怕的 | |
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agonizing
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| adj.痛苦难忍的；使人苦恼的v.使极度痛苦；折磨(agonize的ing形式) | |
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65
futility
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| n.无用 | |
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66
crouched
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| v.屈膝，蹲伏( crouch的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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duel
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| n./v.决斗；(双方的)斗争 | |
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antagonism
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| n.对抗，敌对，对立 | |
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fabric
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| n.织物，织品，布；构造，结构，组织 | |
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sane
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| adj.心智健全的，神志清醒的，明智的，稳健的 | |
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71
joyous
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| adj.充满快乐的；令人高兴的 | |
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margin
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| n.页边空白；差额；余地，余裕；边，边缘 | |
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73
anguish
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| n.(尤指心灵上的)极度痛苦，烦恼 | |
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74
meditation
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| n.熟虑，（尤指宗教的）默想，沉思，（pl.）冥想录 | |
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hearty
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| adj.热情友好的；衷心的；尽情的，纵情的 | |
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battered
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| adj.磨损的；v.连续猛击；磨损 | |
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residues
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| n.剩余，余渣( residue的名词复数 )；剩余财产；剩数 | |
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78
tormented
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| 饱受折磨的 | |
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scouts
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| 侦察员[机，舰]( scout的名词复数 )； 童子军； 搜索； 童子军成员 | |
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80
perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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81
withered
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| adj. 枯萎的，干瘪的，（人身体的部分器官）因病萎缩的或未发育良好的 动词wither的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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82
peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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83
wrestled
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| v.（与某人）搏斗( wrestle的过去式和过去分词 )；扭成一团；扭打；（与…）摔跤 | |
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84
abruptly
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| adv.突然地，出其不意地 | |
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85
beacon
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| n.烽火，（警告用的）闪火灯，灯塔 | |
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86
noted
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| adj.著名的，知名的 | |
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87
grooves
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| n.沟( groove的名词复数 )；槽；老一套；（某种）音乐节奏v.沟( groove的第三人称单数 )；槽；老一套；（某种）音乐节奏 | |
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groove
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| n.沟，槽；凹线，（刻出的）线条，习惯 | |
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clatter
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| v./n.(使)发出连续而清脆的撞击声 | |
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90
pebbles
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| [复数]鹅卵石； 沙砾； 卵石，小圆石( pebble的名词复数 ) | |
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hoarse
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| adj.嘶哑的，沙哑的 | |
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92
galloping
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| adj. 飞驰的, 急性的 动词gallop的现在分词形式 | |
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93
misty
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| adj.雾蒙蒙的，有雾的 | |
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94
scribbled
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| v.潦草的书写( scribble的过去式和过去分词 )；乱画；草草地写；匆匆记下 | |
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dispositions
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| 安排( disposition的名词复数 )； 倾向； （财产、金钱的）处置； 气质 | |
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96
lighter
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| n.打火机，点火器；驳船；v.用驳船运送；light的比较级 | |
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97
thickets
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| n.灌木丛( thicket的名词复数 )；丛状物 | |
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momentous
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| adj.重要的，重大的 | |
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