From Capetown to Ladysmith | Page 4

climbing the vast desert of the Karroo, the
dusty stairway that leads on to the highlands of South Africa. Once you
have seen one desert, all the others are like it; and yet once you have
loved the desert, each is lovable in a new way. In the Karroo you seem
to be going up a winding ascent, like the ramps that lead to an Indian
fortress. You are ever pulling up an incline between hills, making for a
corner round one of the ranges. You feel that when you get round that
corner you will at last see something: you arrive and only see another

incline, two more ranges, and another corner--surely this time with
something to arrive at beyond. You arrive and arrive, and once more
you arrive--and once more you see the same vast nothing you are
coming from. Believe it or not, that is the very charm of a desert--the
unfenced emptiness, the space, the freedom, the unbroken arch of the
sky. It is for ever fooling you, and yet you for ever pursue it. And then
it is only to the eye that cannot do without green that the Karroo is
unbeautiful. Every other colour meets others in harmony--tawny sand,
silver-grey scrub, crimson-tufted flowers like heather, black ribs of
rock, puce shoots of screes, violet mountains in the middle distance,
blue fairy battlements guarding the horizon. And above all broods the
intense purity of the South African azure--not a coloured thing, like the
plants and the hills, but sheer colour existing by and for itself.
It is sheer witching desert for five hundred miles, and for aught I know
five hundred miles after that. At the rare stations you see perhaps one
corrugated-iron store, perhaps a score of little stone houses with a
couple of churches. The land carries little enough stock--here a dozen
goats browsing on the withered sticks goats love, there a dozen
ostriches, high-stepping, supercilious heads in air, wheeling like a troop
of cavalry and trotting out of the stink of that beastly train. Of men,
nothing--only here at the bridge a couple of tents, there at the culvert a
black man, grotesque in sombrero and patched trousers, loafing, hands
in pockets, lazy pipe in mouth. The last man in the world, you would
have said, to suggest glorious war--yet war he meant and nothing else.
On the line from Capetown--that single track through five hundred
miles of desert--hang Kimberley and Mafeking and Rhodesia: it runs
through Dutch country, and the black man was there to watch it.
War--and war sure enough it was. A telegram at a tea-bar, a whisper, a
gathering rush, an electric vibration--and all the station and all the train
and the very niggers on the dunghill outside knew it. War--war at last!
Everybody had predicted it--and now everybody gasped with
amazement. One man broke off in a joke about killing Dutchmen, and
could only say, "My God--my God--my God!"
I too was lost, and lost I remain. Where was I to go? What was I to do?

My small experience has been confined to wars you could put your
fingers on: for this war I have been looking long enough, and have not
found it. I have been accustomed to wars with headquarters, at any rate
to wars with a main body and a concerted plan: but this war in Cape
Colony has neither.
It could not have either. If you look at the map you will see that the
Transvaal and Orange Free State are all but lapped in the red of British
territory. That would be to our advantage were our fighting force
superior or equal or even not much inferior to that of the enemy. In a
general way it is an advantage to have your frontier in the form of a
re-entrant angle; for then you can strike on your enemy's flank and
threaten his communications. That advantage the Boers possess against
Natal, and that is why Sir George White has abandoned Laing's Nek
and Newcastle, and holds the line of the Biggarsberg: even so the Boers
might conceivably get between him and his base. The same advantage
we should possess on this western side of the theatre of war, except that
we are so heavily outnumbered, and have adopted no heroic plan of
abandoning the indefensible. We have an irregular force of mounted
infantry at Mafeking, the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment at
Kimberley, the Munster Fusiliers at De Aar, half the Yorkshire Light
Infantry at De Aar, half the Berkshire Regiment at Naauwpoort--do not
try to pronounce it--and the other half here at Stormberg. The
Northumberlands--the famous Fighting Fifth--came crawling up behind
our train, and may now be at Naauwpoort or De Aar. Total: say, 4100
infantry, of whom some 600 mounted; no cavalry,