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The Passionate Friends Chapter 5 - The War in South Africa Parts 1-3 · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Chapter five, Parts one to three of The Passionate Friends
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  Speaker 1: by H. G. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the
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  Speaker 1: public domain recording by Peter Eastman, Chapter the fifth The
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  Speaker 1: War in South Africa. One. Mary and I did not
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  Speaker 1: meet again for five years, and for nearly all that
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  Speaker 1: time I remained in South Africa. I went from England
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  Speaker 1: a boy. I came back seasoned into manhood. They had
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  Speaker 1: been years of crowded experience, rapid yet complicated growth, disillusionment
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  Speaker 1: and thought. Responsibility had come to me. I had seen death,
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  Speaker 1: I had seen suffering, and held the lives of men
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  Speaker 1: in my hands. Of course, one does not become a
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  Speaker 1: soldier on active service at once for the wishing, and
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  Speaker 1: there was not at first that ready disposition on the
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  Speaker 1: part of the home military authorities, which arose later to
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  Speaker 1: send out young enthusiasts. I could ride and shoot fairly well,
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  Speaker 1: and accordingly I decided to go on my own account
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  Speaker 1: to Durban, for it was manifest that things would begin
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  Speaker 1: in it all, and there attach myself to some of
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  Speaker 1: the local volunteer corps that would certainly be raised. This
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  Speaker 1: took me out of England at once, a thing that
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  Speaker 1: fell in very well with my mood, I would I
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  Speaker 1: was resolved, begin life afresh. I would force myself to
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  Speaker 1: think of nothing but the war. I would never, if
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  Speaker 1: I could help it, think of Mary again. The war
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  Speaker 1: had already begun when I reached Durban. The town was
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  Speaker 1: seething with the news of a great British victory at Dundee.
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  Speaker 1: We came into the port through rain and rough weather,
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  Speaker 1: and passed a big white liner loaded up feverishly from
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  Speaker 1: steam tenders with wealthy refugees going englandward from two troop
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  Speaker 1: ships against the wharfs. There was a great business of
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  Speaker 1: landing horses, the horses of the dragoons and hussars from India.
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  Speaker 1: I spent the best part of my first night in
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  Speaker 1: South Africa in the streets, looking in vain for a bedroom,
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  Speaker 1: and was helped at last by a kindly rich shaw
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  Speaker 1: Zulu to a shanty where I slept upon three chairs.
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  Speaker 1: I remember I felt singularly unwonted. The next day I
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  Speaker 1: set about my volunteering. By midday I had opened communications
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  Speaker 1: with that extremely untried and problematical body, the Imperial light Horse,
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  Speaker 1: and in three days more I was in the company
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  Speaker 1: of a mixed batch of men mostly Australian volunteers, on
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  Speaker 1: my way to a place I had never heard of before,
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  Speaker 1: called Lady Smith, through a country of increasing picturesqueness, and
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  Speaker 1: along a curious, curving little line whose down traffic seemed
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  Speaker 1: always waiting in sidings, and consisted of crowded little trains
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  Speaker 1: full of pitiful fugitives, white, brown and black, stifled and starving.
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  Speaker 1: They were all clamoring to buy food and drink, and
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  Speaker 1: none seemed forthcoming. We shunned at once to allow a
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  Speaker 1: southbound train to pass, a peculiar train that sent every
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  Speaker 1: one on to the line to see prisoners of war.
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  Speaker 1: There they were real, live enemies, rather glum looking out
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  Speaker 1: at us, with faces very like our own, but rather
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  Speaker 1: more unshaven. They had come from the Battle of a Lanslochty.
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  Speaker 1: I had never been out of England before, except for
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  Speaker 1: a little mountaineering in the French Alps and one walking
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  Speaker 1: excursion in the Black Forest, and the scenery of lowernit
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  Speaker 1: Hall amazed me. I had expected nothing nearly so tropical,
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  Speaker 1: so rich and vivid. There were little Mozambique monkeys chattering
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  Speaker 1: in the thick set trees beside the line, and a
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  Speaker 1: quantity of unfamiliar birds and gaudy flowers. Amidst the abundant,
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  Speaker 1: deep greenery, there were aloe and cactus hedges, patches of
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  Speaker 1: unfamiliar cultivation upon the hills Bunchee frondi. Growths that I
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  Speaker 1: learned were bananas and plantains. And there were barbaric insanitary
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: looking kafir crawls, which I supposed had vanished before our civilization.
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  Speaker 1: There seemed an enormous quantity of kaffirs all along the line,
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  Speaker 1: and all of them men, women and children were staring
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  Speaker 1: at the train. The scenery grew finer and bolder, and
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  Speaker 1: more bare and mountainous, until at last we came out
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  Speaker 1: into the great basin in which lay this ladysmith. It
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  Speaker 1: seemed a poor, unimportant, dusty little street of huts as
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  Speaker 1: we approached it, but the great crests beyond struck me
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  Speaker 1: as very beautiful in the morning light. I forgot the
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  Speaker 1: beauty of those hills as we drew into the station.
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  Speaker 1: It was the morning after the surrender of Nicholson's Neck.
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  Speaker 1: I had come to join an army already tremendously astonished
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  Speaker 1: and shattered. The sunny prospect of a triumphal procession to Praetoria,
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  Speaker 1: which had been still in men's minds at Durban, had
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  Speaker 1: vanished altogether. In rather less than a fortnight of stubborn fighting.
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  Speaker 1: We had displayed a strategy that was lighty rather than brilliant,
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  Speaker 1: and lost a whole battery of guns and nearly twelve
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  Speaker 1: hundred prisoners. We had had compensations. Our common soldiers were
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  Speaker 1: good stuff at any rate, but the fact was clear
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  Speaker 1: that we were fighting an army not only very much
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  Speaker 1: bigger than ours, but better equipped, with bigger guns, better information,
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  Speaker 1: and it seemed superior strategy. We were being shoved back
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  Speaker 1: into this ladysmith and encircled. This confused, disconcerted and thoroughly
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  Speaker 1: bad tempered army, whose mules and bullocks cumbered the central
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  Speaker 1: street of the place. Was all that was left of
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  Speaker 1: the British Empire in Natal. Behind it was an unprotected country,
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  Speaker 1: and the line to peter Meretzburg, Durban and the sea.
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  Speaker 1: You cannot imagine how amazed I felt at it. I
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  Speaker 1: had been prepared for a sort of Kentucky quality in
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  Speaker 1: the enemy, illiteracy, pluck, guile and good shooting, but to
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  Speaker 1: find them with more modern arms than our own, more
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  Speaker 1: modern methods Were it we there after all to teach them?
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  Speaker 1: Were it we the twentieth and they the eighteenth century.
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  Speaker 1: The town had been shelled the day before from those
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  Speaker 1: very hills I had admired. At any time it might
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  Speaker 1: be shelled again. The nose of a big gun was
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  Speaker 1: pointed out to me by a blasphemous little private in
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  Speaker 1: the Devons. It was a tremendous, a profoundly impressive black snout.
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  Speaker 1: His opinions of the directing wisdom at home were unquotable.
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  Speaker 1: The platform was a wild confusion of women and children
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  Speaker 1: and colored people. There was even an invalid lady on
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  Speaker 1: a stretcher. Every non combatant who could be got out
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  Speaker 1: of Ladysmith was being hustled out that day. Everyone was
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  Speaker 1: smarting with a sense of defeat and progress. Everyone was
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  Speaker 1: disappointed and worried. One got short answers to one's questions.
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  Speaker 1: For a time I couldn't even find out where I
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  Speaker 1: had to go. Two I fired my first shot at
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  Speaker 1: a fellow creature. Within four days of my arrival, we
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  Speaker 1: rode out down the road to the south to search
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  Speaker 1: some hills, and found the Boers in fair strength. Away
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  Speaker 1: to the east of us. We were dismounted and pushed
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  Speaker 1: up on foot through a wood to a grassy crest. There,
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  Speaker 1: for the first time I saw the enemy, little respectable
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  Speaker 1: looking unsoldier like figures, mostly in black, dodging about upon
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  Speaker 1: a ridge perhaps a mile away. I took a shot
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  Speaker 1: at one of these figures, just before it vanished into
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  Speaker 1: a gully. One or two bullets came overhead, and I
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  Speaker 1: tried to remember what I had picked up about cover.
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  Speaker 1: They made a sound whiff for whiff, a kind of
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  Speaker 1: tearing whistle, and there was nothing but a distant crackling
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  Speaker 1: to give one a hint of their direction until they
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  Speaker 1: took effect. I remember the peculiar smell of the grass
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  Speaker 1: amidst which I crouched, my sudden disgust to realize I
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  Speaker 1: was lying and had to lie now for an indefinite
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  Speaker 1: time in the open sunlight and far from any shade.
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  Speaker 1: And how I wondered whether after all I had wanted
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  Speaker 1: to come to this war. We lay shooting intermittently until
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  Speaker 1: the afternoon. I couldn't understand why. We went forward a
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  Speaker 1: little and at last retired upon Ladysmith. On the way
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  Speaker 1: down to the horses, I came upon my first dead
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  Speaker 1: man He was lying in a crumpled heap, not fifty
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  Speaker 1: yards from where I had been shooting. There he lay
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  Speaker 1: the shattered mirror of a world. One side of his
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  Speaker 1: skull over the ear had been knocked away by a
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  Speaker 1: nearly spent bullet, and he was crumpled up and face upward,
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  Speaker 1: as though he had struggled to his feet and fallen back.
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  Speaker 1: He looked rather horrible, with blue eyes wide open and
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  Speaker 1: glassily amazed, and the black flies clustering upon his clotted
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  Speaker 1: wound and round his open mouth. I halted for a
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  Speaker 1: moment at the sight, and found the keen scrutiny of
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  Speaker 1: a fellow trooper upon me. No good waiting for him,
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  Speaker 1: I said, with an affectation of indifference. But all through
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  Speaker 1: the night I saw him again, and marveled at the
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  Speaker 1: stupendous absurdity of such a death. I was a little feverish,
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  Speaker 1: I remember, and engaged in an interminable theological argument with myself,
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  Speaker 1: why when a man is dead, he should leave so
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  Speaker 1: queer and irrelevant a thing as a body to decay.
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  Speaker 1: I was already very far away from London and Burnmore Park.
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  Speaker 1: I doubt if I thought of Mary at all. For
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  Speaker 1: many days three. It isn't my business to write here
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  Speaker 1: any consecutive story of my war experiences. Luck and some
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  Speaker 1: latent quality in my composition made me a fairly successful soldier.
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  Speaker 1: Among other things, I have an exceptionally good sense of direction,
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  Speaker 1: and that was very useful to me, and in Burnmore Park,
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  Speaker 1: I suppose I had picked up many of the qualities
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  Speaker 1: of a scout. I did some fair outpost work during
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  Speaker 1: the Ladysmith's siege. I could report as well as crawl
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  Speaker 1: and watch, and I was already a sergeant when we
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  Speaker 1: made a night attack and captured and blew up Long Tom.
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  Speaker 1: There After the fight, while we were covering the engineers,
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  Speaker 1: I got a queer steel ball about the size of
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  Speaker 1: a pee in my arm, a bicycle bearings ball, it was,
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  Speaker 1: and had my first experience of an Army surgeon's knife
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  Speaker 1: next day. It was much less painful than I had expected.
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  Speaker 1: I was also hit during the big assault on the
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  Speaker 1: sixth of January in the left shoulder, but so very
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  Speaker 1: slightly that I wasn't technically disabled. They were the only
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  Speaker 1: wounds I got in the war. But I went under
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  Speaker 1: with dysentery before the relief, and though I was by
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  Speaker 1: no means a bad case. I was a very yellow faced,
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  Speaker 1: broken looking convalescent. And when at last the Boer hosts
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  Speaker 1: rolled northward again and Buller's men came riding across the flats,
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  Speaker 1: I had seen some stimulating things during those four months
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  Speaker 1: of actual warfare, a hundred intense impressions of death, wounds, anger, patience, brutality, courage, generosity,
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  Speaker 1: and wasteful destruction. Above all, wasteful destruction. To correct the easy,
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  Speaker 1: optimistic patriotism of my university days. There is a depression
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  Speaker 1: in the opening stages of fever, and a feebleness in
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  Speaker 1: a convalescence on a starvation diet that leads men to
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  Speaker 1: broad and sober views. Heavens, how I hated the horse
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  Speaker 1: extract cheval we called it. That served us for beef tea.
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  Speaker 1: When I came down from Ladysmith to the sea to
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  Speaker 1: pick up my strength, I had not an illusion left
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  Speaker 1: about the serene, divinely appointed empire of the English. But
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: if I had less national conceit, I had certainly more
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  Speaker 1: patriotic determination that grew with every day of returning health.
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  Speaker 1: The reality of this war had got hold of my imagination,
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  Speaker 1: as indeed, for a time it caught hold of the
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  Speaker 1: English imagination altogether, and I was now almost fiercely keen
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  Speaker 1: to learn and do at the first chance. I returned
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  Speaker 1: to active service, and now I was no longer a
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  Speaker 1: disconsolate lover taking war for a cure, but in earnest
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  Speaker 1: and I think reasonably able young officer, very alert for chances.
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  Speaker 1: I got those chances soon enough. I rejoined our men
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  Speaker 1: beyond Kimberly on the way to Mafeking. We were the
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  Speaker 1: extreme British left in the advance upon Praetoria, and I
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  Speaker 1: rode with Mahan and was ambushed with him in a
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  Speaker 1: little affair beyond Codessrand. It was a sudden, brisk encounter.
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  Speaker 1: We got fired into at close quarters, but we knew
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  Speaker 1: our work by that time and charged home and brought
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  Speaker 1: in a handful of prisoners to make up for the
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  Speaker 1: men we had lost. A few days later we came
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  Speaker 1: into the flattened ruins of the quaintest siege in history.
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  Speaker 1: Three days after we relieved Maffaking, I had the luck
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  Speaker 1: to catch one of Snyman's retreating guns rather easily, the
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  Speaker 1: only big gun that was taken at Maffaking. I came
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  Speaker 1: upon it unexpectedly with about twenty men, spotted a clump
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  Speaker 1: of brush four hundred yards ahead, galloped into it. Before
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  Speaker 1: the Boers realized the boldness of our game, shot all
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  Speaker 1: the draft docks, and while they hesitated, and held them
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  Speaker 1: up until Chambers arrived on the scene. The incident got
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  Speaker 1: perhaps a disproportionate share of attention in the papers at
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  Speaker 1: home because of the way in which Maffacking had been
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  Speaker 1: kept in focus. I was mentioned twice again in despatches
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  Speaker 1: before we rode across to join Roberts in Pretoria and
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  Speaker 1: see what we believed to be the end of the war.
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  Speaker 1: We were too late to go on up to Cammatoport,
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  Speaker 1: and had some rather blank and troublesome work on the
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  Speaker 1: north side of the town. That was indeed the end
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  Speaker 1: of the Great War. The rest was a struggle with gorillas.
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  Speaker 1: Every one thought things were altogether over. I wrote to
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  Speaker 1: my father discussing the probable date of my return. But
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: there were great chances still to come for an active
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  Speaker 1: young officer. The gorilla war was to prolong the struggle
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  Speaker 1: yet for a whole laborious, eventful year, and I was
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  Speaker 1: to make the most of those later opportunities. Those years
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  Speaker 1: in South Africa are stuck into my mind like like
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  Speaker 1: those pink colored pages about something else when finds at
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  Speaker 1: times in a railway and dequeteur Chance had put this
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  Speaker 1: work in my way and started me upon it with
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  Speaker 1: a reputation that wasn't altogether deserved, And I found I
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  Speaker 1: could only live up to it and get things done
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  Speaker 1: well by a fixed and extreme concentration of my attention.
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  Speaker 1: But the whole business was so interesting that I found
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  Speaker 1: it possible to make that concentration. Essentially, warfare is a
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  Speaker 1: game of elaborate but witty problems in precaution and anticipation
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: with amazing scope for invention. You so saturate your mind
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  Speaker 1: with the facts and possibilities of the situation that intuitions emerge.
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  Speaker 1: It did not do to think of anything beyond those
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: facts and possibilities, and does budges and counter dodges, for
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: to do so was to let in irrelevant and distracting lights.
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  Speaker 1: During all that concluding year of service, I was not
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  Speaker 1: so much myself as a forced and artificial thing I
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: made out of myself to meet the special needs of
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: the time. I became a bore outwitting animal. When I
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: was tired of this specialized thinking. Then the best relief
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: I found was some quite trivial occupation, playing poker, yelling
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: in the chorus of some interminable song one of the
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: men would sing, or coining South African limericks, or playing
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: burlesque bouri mae with Fred Maxim, who was then my
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: second in command, yet occasionally thought overtook me. I remember
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: lying one night out upon a huge dark hill side,
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: in a melancholy wilderness of rock ribbed hills, waiting for
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  Speaker 1: one of the flying commandos that were breaking northward from
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: Cape Colony towards the Orange River. In front of Colonel Eustace.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: We had been riding all day. I was taking risks
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  Speaker 1: in what I was doing, and there was something very
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  Speaker 1: cheerless in a fireless bivouac. My mind became uncontrollably active.
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  Speaker 1: It was a clear, still night. The young moon set
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  Speaker 1: early in a glow of white that threw the jagged
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: contours of a hill to the southeast into strange, weird prominence.
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: The patches of moonshine evaporated from the summits of the
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: nearer hills and left them hard and dark. Then there
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: was nothing but a great, soft, black darkness below that
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: jagged edge, and above it the stars, very large and bright.
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: Somewhere under that enormous serenity, to the south of us,
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  Speaker 1: the hunted Boers must be halting to snatch an hour
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  Speaker 1: or so of rest, and beyond them again extended the long,
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: thin net of the pursuing British. It all seemed infinitely
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: small and remote. There was no sound of it, no
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  Speaker 1: hint of it, no searchlight at work, no faintest streamer
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  Speaker 1: of smoke, nor the reflection of a solitary fire in
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: the sky. All this business that had held my mind
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  Speaker 1: so long was reduced to insignificance. Between the blackness of
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: the hills and the greatness of the sky. A little
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: trouble it seemed of no importance under the southern cross,
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: And I fell wondering, as I had not wondered for long,
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: at the forces that had brought me to this occupation,
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: and the strangeness of this game of war, which had
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: filled the mind and tempered the spirit of a quarter
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: of a million of men for time, two hard living years.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: I fell thinking of the dead. No soldier in a
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: proper state of mind ever thinks of the dead. At times.
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: Of course, one suspects one catches a man glancing at
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  Speaker 1: the pair of boots sticking out stiffly from under a blanket.
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: But at once he speaks of other things. Nevertheless, some
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: suppressed part of my being had been stirring up ugly
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: and monstrous memories of distortion, disfigurement, torment and decay. Of
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: dead men in stained and ragged clothes, with their soul
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: worn boots drawn up under them, Of the blood trail
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: of a dying man who had crawled up to a
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: dead comrade rather than die alone. Of kafirs, heaping limp
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: pitiful bodies together for burial, Of the voices of inaccessible
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: wounded in the rain on wagon hill, cry in the
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: night of a heap of men we found in a
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: donga three days dead, of the dumb agony of shell
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  Speaker 1: torn horses, and the vast, distressful litter and heavy brooding stench,
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  Speaker 1: the cans and cartridge cases, and filth and bloody rags
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: of a shelled and captured logger. I will confess I
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: have never lost my horror of dead bodies. They are
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: dreadful to me, dreadful. I dread their stiff attitudes, their
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: terrible intent inattention to this day, such memories haunt me.
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: That night they nearly overwhelmed me. I thought of the
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: grim silence of the surgeon's tent, the miseries and disordered
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: ravings of the fever hospital, of the midnight burial of
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: a journalist at Ladysmith, with the distant searchlight on bowana
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: flicking suddenly upon our faces and making the coffin shine
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: silver white. What a vast trail of destruction South Africa
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: had become. I thought of the black scorched stones of
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: burnt and abandoned farms of wretched natives we had found,
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  Speaker 1: shot like dogs and flung aside raddently, amazed, decaying in
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: infinite indignity. Of stories of treachery and fierce revenges sweeping
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: along in the trail of the greater fighting. I knew
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: too well of certain atrocities. One had to believe them
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: incredibly stupid to escape the conviction that they were incredibly evil.
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: For a time, my mind could make no headway against
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: its monstrous assemblage of horror. There was something in that
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: jagged black hill, against the moonshine, and the gigantic basin
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: of darkness out of which it rose, that seemed to
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: gather all these gaunt and grisly effects into one appalling
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: heap of agonizing futility. That rock rose up and crouched
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: like something that broods and watches. I remember I sat
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: up in the darkness staring at it. I found myself murmuring,
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: get the proportions of things, Get the proportions of things.
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: I had an absurd impression of a duel between myself
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: and the cavernous antagonism of the huge black spaces below me.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: I argued that all this pain and waste was no
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: more than the salvage of a proportionately limitless fabric of sane, interested, impassioned,
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: and joyous living. These stiff still memories seemed to refute me.
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: But why us? These seemed to insist in some way?
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: Its essential this margin. I stopped at that, If all
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: this pain, waste, violence, anguish is essential to life, why
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: does my spirit rise against it? What is wrong with me?
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: I got from that into a corner of self examination.
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: Did I respond over much to these painful aspects in life?
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: When I was a boy, I had never had the
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: spirit even to kill rats. Sitons came into the meditation. Siddens,
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: the essential Englishman, a little scornful, throwing out contemptuous phrases.
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: Soft Was I a soft? What was a soft? Something?
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: Not rough? Not hardy and bloody? I felt I had
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: to own to the word, after years of resistance, a
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: dreadful thing. It is when a great empire has to
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: rely upon soft soldiers. Was civilization breeding a type of
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: human being too tender to go on living? I stuck
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: for a time, as one does on these nocturnal occasions,
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: at the word hypersensitive, going round it and about it.
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: I do not know now how it was that I
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: passed from a mood so darkened and sunless to one
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: of exceptional exultation. But I recall very clearly that I did.
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: I believe that I made a crowning effort against this
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: despair and horror that had found me out in the darkness,
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: and overcome. I cried in my heart for help, as
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: a lost child cries to God. I seemed to remember
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: a rush of impassioned prayer, not only for myself, not
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: chiefly for myself, but for all those smashed and soiled
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: and spoilt and battered residues of men whose memories tormented me.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: I prayed to God that they had not lived in vain.
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: That particularly, those poor Kaffir Scouts might not have lived
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: in vain. They are like children, I said, it was
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: a murder of children by children. My horror passed insensibly.
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: I have to feel the dreadfulness of these things, I
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: told myself, because it is good for such a creature
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: as I to feel them dreadful. But if one understood,
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: it would all be simple, not dreadful at all. I
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: clung to that and repeated it. It would all be
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: perfectly simple. It would come out no more horrible than
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: the things they used to frighten me as a child.
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: The shadow on the stairs, the white moonrise reflected on
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: a barked and withered tree, A peculiar dream of moving
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: geometrical forms, an ugly illustration in the Arabian nights. I
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: do not know how long I wrestled with God and
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: prayed that night, But abruptly the shadows broke, and very
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: suddenly and swiftly, my spirit seemed to flame up into space,
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: like some white beacon that is set alight. Everything became
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: light and clear and confident. I was assured that all
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: was well with us, with us who lived and fought,
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: and with the dead who rotted now in fifty thousand
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: hasty graves. For a long time, it seemed I was
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: repeating again and again with soundless lips, and finding the
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: deepest comfort in my words. And out of our agonies
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: comes victory. Out of our agonies comes victory. Have pity
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: on us, God, our father. I think that mood passed
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: quite insensibly, from waking to a kind of clear dreaming.
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: I have an impression that I fell asleep and was
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: aroused by a gun. Yet I was certainly still setting
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: up when I heard that gun. I was astonished to
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: find things darkly visible about me. I had not noted
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: that the stars were growing pale, until the sound of
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: this gun very far away, called my mind back to
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: the grooves in which it was now accustomed to move.
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: I started into absolute wakefulness. A gun, I found myself
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: trying to see my watch. I heard a slipping and
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: clatter of pebbles near me, and discovered Fred Maxim at
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: my side. Look, he said, hoarse with excitement. Already he
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: pointed to a string of dim little figures galloping helter
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: skelter over the neck and down the gap in the
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: hills towards us. They came up against the pale western sky,
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: little nodding swaying black dots, and flashed over and were
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: lost in the misty purple groove towards us. They must
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: have been riding through the night, the British following to them.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: We were invisible. Behind us was the shining east. We
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: were in a shadow, still too dark to betray us.
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: In a moment, I was afoot and called out to
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: the man. My philosophy, my deep questionings, all torn out
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: of my mind, like a page of scribbled poetry plucked
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: out of a business notebook. Cocky figures were up all
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: about me, passing the word and hurrying to their places.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: All the dispositions I had made over night came back
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: clear and sharp into my mind. Mind. We hadn't long
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: for preparations, it seems now there were only a few
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: busy moments before the fighting began. It must have been
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: much longer in reality. By that time we had seen
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: their gun come over, and a train of carts. They
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: were blundering right into us. Every moment it was getting lighter,
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: and the moment of contact nearer. Then crack from down
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: below among the rocks, and there was a sudden stoppage
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: of the trail of dark shapes upon the hillside. Crack
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: came a shot from our extreme left. I damned the
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: impatient men who had shot away the secret of our presence,
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: But we had to keep them at a shooting distance.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: Would the Boers have the wit to charge through us
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: before the daylight came? Or should we hold them? I
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: had a swift, disturbing idea. Would they try to bolt
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: across our front to the left? Had we extended far
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: enough across the deep valley to our left? But they'd
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: hesitate on account of their gun. The gun couldn't go
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: that way because of the gullies and thickets. But suppose
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: they tried it. I hung between momentous decisions. Then all
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: up the dim hill side I could make out the
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: bowers halting and riding back. One rifle across there flashed
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: We held them. We had begun the fight of Peter's Neck,
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: which ended before midday with the surrender of Simon Boda
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: and over seven hundred men. It was the crown of
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: all my soldiering. End of Chapter five, Parts one to three,