THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 THE EPISTLES OF ATKINS
 
 'n 
 
 %-^ i 
 
 From the sketch bii 
 
 Morlinin Mfnpes, R.I. 

 
 C|)e Cptstles of ^tfeins 
 
 By James- Milne 
 
 Author of "The Romance of a Pro-Consul," etc. 
 
 Being Some of the Lights^ on Human 
 Nature in the Ordeal of War^ which 
 Illumine the Letters of the Common 
 Soldier^ written from South Africa to 
 his People at Home ; and so an 
 Answer to the Question^ " How does 
 it feel to be in Battle ? " 
 
 London 
 
 T. Fisher Unwin 
 1902
 
 THIS BOOK 
 
 IS DEDICATED, 
 
 IN SIMPLE 
 
 HONOUR, TO 
 
 MAJOR-GENERAL SIR 
 
 H ECTOR 
 
 MAC DONALD 
 
 , K.C. 
 
 B,, D.S.O., 
 
 WHOSE LIFE- 
 
 STORY BELONGS 
 
 TO THE BRITISH 
 
 SOLDIER.
 
 or 
 
 Chapters & 
 
 Their Contents 
 
 I. Arms and the Man . . . . i 
 
 Setting out to ausiver the question, How does 
 it feel to fight, to make ivar, to sound the 
 deeps of battle ? 
 
 II. What Campaigning Means . . .20 
 
 Its marches and bivouacs, its commonplaces 
 and surprises, its trials and vagrant joys: 
 altogether a singular school of experience. 
 
 III. Battle in Being 39 
 
 TIte series of pictures it is to the eye, its near 
 rattle and far roar to the ear, and its wearing 
 strain upon the nerves. 
 
 IV. Under Fire 58 
 
 How the soldier takes his baptism, the queer, 
 subtle sensations attendant upon it, and the 
 subsequent fine growth of indifference. 
 V
 
 Chapters and their Contents 
 
 V. The Combat Deepens . . .79 
 
 Thrills of the charge, the shocli of close grips 
 when men are "fghtin' mad" and the cold 
 deadliitcss of the long-range duel. 
 
 VI. Hit ! 99 
 
 Dirges the bullets play on the strings of life 
 they have broken ; a battle-field chorus crying 
 to the night of the long silence. 
 
 VII. Corners of War . . . .119 
 
 The individual amid the thunder of his sur- 
 roundings, ivhich, while they occupy his full 
 energies, do not obscure his soul. 
 
 VIII. The Roll Call 140 
 
 They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest 
 
 Uncoffined—just as found : 
 His landmark is a kopje-crest 
 
 That breaks the veldt around. 
 
 Thomas Hardy. 
 
 The day's high ivork is over and done, 
 And these no more will need the sun: 
 Bloiv, you bugles of England, blow ! 
 
 W. E. Henley. 
 
 IX. Smiles and Tears .... 160 
 
 Times when laughter and tragedy play hide- 
 and-seek with each other, so attesting in war 
 the great compromise of human affairs. 
 vi
 
 Chapters and their Contents 
 
 X. In Hospital 179 
 
 Red-ldtcr talcs from a tclliuii-Uouse ivhcre 
 hurts ami ills arc borne with simple forti- 
 tude, robust cliccrfiiliicss, a }lay philosophy. 
 
 XI. One Touch of Nature . . . 197 
 
 Shoic'ing the threads that knit fghiiii^ men 
 ill a common brotherhood, evoi while they 
 wrestle for mastery, in the scarlet surge of 
 war. 
 
 XII. "The Men are Splendid!" 
 
 . 216 
 
 Some points in illustration of this, with 
 general observations on Thomas Atkins, a 
 man of parts. 
 
 Twelve Illustrations 
 
 From Actual War Sketches 
 
 Tu Face P 
 
 age 
 
 
 To Fac 
 
 e Page 
 
 Figliting Mac " . Froittisp 
 
 uce 
 
 "Corners of War" . 
 
 
 119 
 
 What Campaigning Means " . 
 
 20 
 
 "The Roll Call" 
 
 
 140 
 
 Battle in Being" . 
 
 39 
 
 " Smiles and Tears " . 
 
 
 160 
 
 Under Fire " . . . . 
 
 58 
 
 "In Hospital" . 
 
 
 179 
 
 Tlie Combat Deepens " . 
 
 79 
 
 " One Touch of Nature 
 
 '. 
 
 ")7 
 
 Hitl" 
 
 99 
 
 "The Men are Splendid 
 
 !" 
 
 2l6 
 
 VII
 
 [All rii^hts rcsciTcd.]
 
 I.— ARMS AND THE MAN 
 
 Setting out to answer the question, Hozv does it feel to fight, 
 to make war, to sound the deeps of battle? 
 
 THERE is ever light on the hills, a light 
 which even the angry flare of Mauser 
 and Lee-Metford cannot hide. We see its 
 glow in the letters of the common soldier, 
 written when the South African War was new, 
 big in battle, and he was impressionable. 
 
 What should he do but put his emotions, 
 feelings, experiences, himself in the heart of 
 war, into intimate epistles to those who waited 
 far away ? He must make known to them its 
 strange revelations to his own soul and body, 
 both gripped in its embrace. The wondrous 
 book of life and death had opened at an 
 unknown page ; the sensations which warfare, 
 
 I B
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 as science now orders it, a veritable crack of 
 doom, breeds in the fighting man. 
 
 Simple faith, willing endurance, calling 
 heroism by no louder name than duty, 
 speaking the enemy fair and well ! These 
 things are set down, none thinking to do it, 
 in the brave epistles of our plain captains. 
 Who would forget them, so full of vitality, 
 colour, movement ; who could ? They throb 
 like a heart beating. They are the common 
 soldier's gospel, and they cry the Amen : 
 
 " Be of good courage, and let us play the 
 men for our people, and for the cities of our 
 God, and the Lord do that which seemeth 
 Him good." 
 
 So the Ironsides, of an age which still 
 hums to us, were exhorted in the "Souldier's 
 Catechisme " of the Parliament's Army. Now, 
 it is the other way about. Our ** souldiers " 
 give us a " Catechisme," well suited to 
 encourage and instruct " all that have taken 
 up Armes " in the battle of life. Not theirs 
 " to reason why," but to play the men in all 
 affairs. Here, surely, is the supreme teaching 
 of this legion of dispatches from Atkins, 
 
 2
 
 Arms and the Man 
 
 made, by the board school, his own corre- 
 spondent. But let us discover. 
 
 You march with the soldier, not the sage 
 in khaki ; only how the twain meet each 
 other ! " Ugh ! another shell dropped close 
 by, sending dirt and stones in all directions." 
 Ugh ! That is how it feels to be disturbed 
 while writing a letter under fire. The word 
 expresses the situation. It is an essay on 
 Atkins taking up his pen, a sermon on the 
 sources of his inspiration. 
 
 Shell and bullets whistle above a Norfolk, 
 and he scribbles to their music. Why such 
 a desperate pursuit of letters ? Perhaps a 
 Cornwall explains the reason. With him it 
 is to relieve the monotony of lying flat on 
 the ground while a " hot fire " rakes over- 
 head. Or listen to a Lancashire. His folks 
 may wonder why he is writing with the din 
 of a fight actually in his ears. " Well," 
 he intimates to them, *' we have been at it 
 now for six days, from sunrise till dark, 
 and the general thought it time to give us 
 a rest." Agreed. 
 
 How to secure a sheet of paper for the 
 3
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 epistle home ? It is really a nice problem. 
 " Cannot get anything to write on," wails 
 a dragoon, while an Essex private is with- 
 out an envelope in which to put the frag- 
 ment of paper that good luck has brought 
 to him. Being ingenious, he doubles it up, 
 fastens the edges ;vith a stamp, and con- 
 fidently posts to England. His trust in 
 the postman, the " sweet little cherub " of 
 a grinding, material globe, the Atlas of our 
 day, is justified. 
 
 A Gordon Highlander uses a Boer quill 
 picked up on the field of Elandslaagte, and 
 a Welsh Fusilier presents us with a Briton 
 and a Boer in literary alliance. "Just a 
 line," the Welshman dictates, " to tell you a 
 curio about this letter. There is a young 
 Boer lad in our hospital, and he is writing it 
 for me. He talks as good English as myself. 
 There are plenty more Boers and they are 
 kind to us and we to them." Put that soft 
 patch of war against the harsh plight of a 
 Highlander who writes with his left hand, 
 because he has lost the other. However, he 
 thinks himself lucky to be alive. 
 4
 
 Arms and the Man 
 
 Personal disasters have one merit. They 
 mean personal news, which Atkins in the 
 field often searches far for, without finding. 
 He knows what his home readers want to 
 know — all about himself; but he is ill at 
 telHng it. Perhaps, in despair, he flies to 
 a hollow mirth, or to pathos and some com- 
 rade who is no more. 
 
 As an example of the first style, take the 
 soldier whose excuse for writing with a stump 
 of pencil is, " We have to employ our type- 
 writer for chopping wood out here, as we are 
 short of axes." Of the second style the 
 examples are many and beautiful ; tributes to 
 the brotherhood of battle. If a man falls, a 
 comrade writes the story, in round hand, and 
 sorrowing words, to his relatives in the Old 
 Country. 
 
 Here we have a link which binds us all 
 together. How we treasure every little word 
 about the passing of one near and dear to us, 
 whose eyes have not looked their last into 
 ours ! Bereavement at a distance is sore ; 
 unutterably sore when it brings a letter, all 
 blank, a white sheet save for the opening 
 words, " Dear Mother." 
 5
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 A soldier is found dead on the veldt, hours 
 after a fight, with such a letter in his hand. 
 Death, following his wound, has struck before 
 he can scrawl his dying message to his mother. 
 He could have written nothing more touching 
 than what he has not written. Home and 
 the home folks ! Ever that is the last 
 thought, the last look backward, as the road 
 turns up the hill. 
 
 Home news comes for war news, and 
 Atkins believes that he has the best of the 
 exchange. " I was just dropping off to 
 sleep," a hussar gives us the evidence, 
 " when my name was called out. I uttered a 
 few words, for I fancied I had to go out again 
 on the march. But to my surprise it was 
 your letter, and I could feel the blood run all 
 over me with joy. I went straight to the 
 sticks which were burning at the cook-house, 
 and read as much as I could. When I read 
 little Mary's I couldn't help laughing ; it 
 seemed to put fresh life into me." 
 
 There we have a glimpse of the other half 
 of the famous correspondence of Atkins. To 
 him it is tenderly sacred ; to us it is 
 6
 
 Arms and the Man 
 
 eloquently silent. But we may hear, full and 
 clear, as bells ring, the calling of heart to 
 heart, soul to soul, across the seas. Their 
 great waters whisper love's message in calm 
 or mighty rushing wind, and the world grows 
 gratefully small at the thought of it — a 
 sunshine world after all. 
 
 " Write as often as you can," a Suffolk 
 prays his mother ; "a letter from home is 
 precious on the battlefield." A Dublin 
 Fusilier is actually in the firing line when a 
 letter, in the loved scrawl of his mother, is 
 delivered to him. Others have forgotten the 
 South African mail ; she never. The mother's 
 heart is in every turn of the wandering 
 address ; in every wrong road of the earnest 
 spelling. That son lets his rifle cool, while 
 he reads his epistle. 
 
 Again, a soldier is brought to a halt in the 
 thick of a charge, to pick up an envelope 
 which has fallen from his pocket. His sister's 
 letter! He had received it while saddling-up 
 and forgotten it in that hurry. Now he 
 stands on a hillock, fair in the fire-way, reads 
 it line by line, and resumes the war. Who 
 would not write to win such a reading ? 
 7
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 " Opened under martial law ! " A Durham 
 Light Infantryman tells us, with a serious 
 laugh, of the faces men make at sight of a 
 letter so stamped. They gaze at the envelopes 
 in silent dismay, and think they are very 
 harshly treated. Atkins is aggrieved with 
 the little pink label ; he declines to have the 
 military steam-roller come into the confidences 
 of wife or sweetheart. However, the military 
 steam-roller is a soulless machine, and perhaps 
 its interference does not matter very much. 
 Any cold shadow which it has cast disappears 
 in the warmth of a bonfire, lit to let a camp 
 devour a welcome arrival of letters. When 
 the light of morning comes, the soldiers, as 
 one of them records, all have " another good 
 read." This stroke is masterly. 
 
 Atkins is concerned lest his people at home 
 should worry about his safety, and he keeps 
 cheering them up. Here we have a study in 
 temperaments. " You can't beheve," roars 
 an Irishman, determined to convince, " how 
 happy I am when fighting ! I feel as if it 
 were a football match." " I'm quite enjoying 
 this lot," crows an Essex man, " and you bet
 
 Arms and the Man 
 
 I'm going to take on for twenty-one years." 
 An artillery smith, who has been through 
 the scenes of Magersfontein, feels that special 
 eulogy is required to make them seem cheer- 
 ful at home. " I am happier than ever I 
 was," he insists ; " it's just the sort of life I 
 like." 
 
 This is the grand style of comforting, yet a 
 bugler boy contrives to catch the trick of it. 
 He would be pleased to spend Christmas with 
 his mother, but the open veldt, and the blast 
 of his own bugle, blowing the charge, please 
 him more. " That's the tune," he says ; 
 "it's A I." It is the tune to which his 
 mother's heart shakes, and he knows it, and 
 is trying to cheer her up. To have a brave 
 heart in a far land, is the next best thing to 
 spending Christmas at his mother's fireside. 
 
 " Great glory, terrible havoc among the 
 enemy, but a picnic better than Hampstead 
 Heath, to ourselves ! " It sounds fine, but 
 how easily it misses fi^re, as when a spacious 
 fighter, by way of minimising the risks of 
 war, assures his wife that he has killed 
 thirty-two of the enemy, without himself 
 9
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 getting a scratch. "My captain, who stood 
 behind me," he takes oath, " counted every 
 one, and at the thirty-second he got so 
 excited that he could count no more." No 
 wonder. 
 
 The doubts which there assail us, as to the 
 hilarity of war, are enforced by an incident 
 told in laconic words. A soldier, in the 
 leisure of an evening, has pencilled a letter 
 saying, " What capital sport war is, to my 
 idea!" Next day his best friend is killed, 
 whereupon he tears up the letter and writes 
 another. It is different. 
 
 There are those who cheer up their 
 relatives by frank confidences, by blinking 
 nothing and being prepared for anything. 
 " My day is fixed, no doubt ; it may be in 
 this war, it may not be." " Good-bye ; I 
 pray night and day that my wife may not be 
 left a widow." " The list of casualties will 
 tell you if anything happens to me. We all 
 stand much the same chance, and I am ready 
 for what comes." Quiet, simple faith ! 
 
 A certain pre-vision goes with it, as *' I am 
 almost sure I shall get through now, after 
 
 ID
 
 Arms and the Man 
 
 what I have experienced." Or, *' I trust my 
 good fortune may last, but should I fall I've 
 arranged that you shall hear." The waiting 
 on the brink is a solemn, sober affair, nor 
 is it less becoming when we have this glad 
 anticipation of life beyond the grave : *' If I 
 fall, I shall hope to meet you all in the next 
 world." It is the parting word. 
 
 One soldier wants to say it, but shrinks 
 from the trial so implied. He abruptly 
 takes refuge in the clumsy aside, " Don't fret 
 yourself; you won't be a widow yet." It is 
 his plan of hiding his deepest thought ; and 
 further it is a token of the reserve natural 
 to English character, bred amid the silent 
 seas. 
 
 Another scribe manoeuvres at great length 
 to outflank what he, also, has most in mind, 
 the issue of life or death for himself The 
 result is strange. " Be assured," it runs, " I 
 am still a teetotaler. I have not had any 
 beer since Christmas. We cannot get any!" 
 No doubt his wife, knowing her husband, is 
 able to draw this false veil aside. Yet it is 
 an odd way of saying " Goodbye, darling, 
 II
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 should it be fated that we are never to meet 
 again ! " 
 
 Mostly the note is the stalwart one : "I'm 
 going to fight with the intention of seeing 
 Old England again ; " or, " I'm in full trim 
 and will fight till I drop, and don't forget it." 
 Atkins is a master of the graphic sentence, 
 the picturesque phrase ; he explodes into 
 literary shrapnel. At the end of many days 
 an officer gives him a small bottle of beer, 
 and he " nearly faints at the name." He 
 compares himself, in the desperate heat, to a 
 cooked dinner, but at sight of a dark-visaged 
 figure, on a Basuto pony, is equal to the word- 
 snapshot, " Oh, crikey, here's the Jack o' 
 Clubs ! " 
 
 Atkins has a wash and feels as if it were 
 a birthday. He complains that he hears 
 nothing but the countersign, yet communi- 
 cates the graphic news-summary about 
 Ladysmith, " We ate three regiments of 
 cavalry." A trooper ordered to the relief of 
 "the dreadful old lady," declares, " I'll either 
 be covered with glory, or cold pork." He 
 has probably been in the meat trade. 
 
 12
 
 Arms and the Man 
 
 A Highlander is defter at making a con- 
 trast. He has grown so thin, on campaigning, 
 that his kilt goes twice round him ; therefore 
 he fears that he may be reported absent while 
 on parade, A sapper pictures himself and 
 comrades as *' sketches," and a Buff enables 
 us to believe it : "I resemble a goat more 
 than a human being, as I have hair all round 
 my chivvy ! " That is the penny plain, and 
 next to the twopenny coloured — " The white 
 ants ate a hole in the seat of my trousers, and 
 I had to shorten the legs to patch it." Other 
 soldiers have not this fertility of resource, for 
 we are told, " There are any amount with the 
 flag of truce flying behind." 
 
 We have the whole vigil of the captives at 
 Pretoria in the cry, " Every day there is the 
 same thirsting for news and hoping for 
 release." The barbed-wire entanglements 
 sing it to the breezes, which, carry they south 
 or north, east or west, find, " Poor old 
 Atkins blowing it out in South Africa ! 
 Eight-inch guns, with traction-engines hauling 
 them, are described as " nice cigars to play 
 with ! " Atkins delights in the anti-climax. 
 13
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 It is a favourite method of expressing any 
 idea he wants to convey. His use of the 
 negative — "the bullets didn't half make my 
 heart patter ! " — to secure an emphatic 
 affirmative, is also constant, telling us of the 
 English peasant in the ranks. 
 
 A shell from a " Long Tom " is likened 
 to a coal-scuttle coming through the air, and 
 a defective shell to the fizzing of a cracker. 
 Mauser bullets, fired in the dark, seem so 
 many electric sparks, as they spit upon the 
 rocks. A string of Boer camp-fires suggests 
 Christmas cooking, only that can hardly be, 
 as " our lyddite shells have been taking the 
 ridges off the hills." This is a gunner's 
 tribute to his own shooting, but it is care- 
 fully impersonal, for Atkins prefers other 
 people to praise him. 
 
 " Hell opened upon us," says one of the 
 Black Watch about Magersfontein, which is 
 also called " a proper hell-hole." " Knocked 
 us over like playing skittles ! " There, too, 
 we have the holocaust of Magersfontein. 
 The drooping of the infantry at Stormberg is 
 compared, with effect, if with exaggeration, 
 14
 
 Arms and the Man 
 
 to the cutting of corn. A frontal attack, 
 made somewhere, invites the sarcastic sum- 
 ming up, " It was like a party of schoolboys 
 assailing Gibraltar with pea-shooters." The 
 phrases a " drawing-room general " and 
 " Hyde-Park soldiering " are borrowed 
 rather than invented. 
 
 But you have Atkins the creator when you 
 stumble upon the expression, " They have 
 put the tin hat on it all." A soldier who 
 has been having an agreeable time down 
 country, with much wassail, is ordered to the 
 front where the bayonets do the carving. It 
 is, indeed, putting the " tin hat on it all." 
 Atkins touches the spot. He is critical of 
 young officers for being recklessly brave, and 
 conveys his criticism in the eulogy, " They're 
 all busting for glory." He cuts his own 
 beard torpedo shape, and after eating his 
 emergency ration, calls it " the imaginary 
 ration." Still, he discovers that if it's little 
 it's good for its purpose ; that is, to keep 
 body and soul together in an emergency. 
 
 Atkins, when he is quite fresh from Eng- 
 land, has a gay desire to re-christen all things 
 15
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 colonial with names of his own. Thus the 
 Durban Light Infantry are dubbed the 
 "Dear Little Innocents" or the "Devil's 
 Latest Issue," as the choice may be. 
 " D. F. H." ^ " ' Driven from home,' my 
 boy," somebody gravely explains, " driven 
 from home " ; but the initials mean the Dia- 
 mond Fields Horse. A regiment's shoulder- 
 strap letters are a ready excuse for adding 
 one more fond nickname to the curious list 
 in the British Army. And to the hills 
 the same corrective is applied, in the same 
 thorough way. " We have been building 
 sangers on a mountain with a name like 
 Tintwa Inyoni. For short we call it Tin- 
 tacks and Onions." 
 
 A Boer Nordenfelt in action is entered as 
 a " door-knocker," because " it goes rap, tap, 
 tap, just like a mighty postman's knock." 
 A Vickers quick-firing shell-gun draws from 
 a man the ruddy exclamation, " You watch 
 
 it. Bill ; we'll have that d d laughing 
 
 hyena let off at us in a minute ! " If Bill is 
 
 wounded his main after-thought will be to 
 
 " get his own back," and in the interval it 
 
 i6
 
 Arms and the Man 
 
 will cheer him greatly to hear that his 
 regiment is " making a good name." That 
 means glory, alike for those who have lost 
 "our mess number," and for those who have 
 not yet " passed in our checks." 
 
 An artillerist, with a bullet-hole in his 
 helmet, allows it to be an " outer to the 
 Paulites"; still this does not come near to 
 " punching his ticket." A Cockney, who 
 has belittled the enemy as shots, is hit 
 slightly, on the cheek, at a range of a 
 thousand yards. He is lost in surprise for 
 a moment, then his wits return, his con- 
 sistency asserts itself, and he exclaims to his 
 expectant comrades, "Awter!" But Atkins, 
 who draws his similes from all sorts of sources, 
 allows that " Kruger's pills, when properly 
 taken, are a sure relief." His considered 
 advice is to do without the treatment. 
 
 He "shakes hands with himself" after a 
 narrow escape, and well he may if he has 
 been in the jaws of Spion Kop. '* It felt," 
 we are told of that agony, "as if one had 
 been sentenced to death and was waiting for 
 a reprieve." This is deadly realism, and you 
 17 C
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 almost hear the " slushy thud " of a bullet as 
 it strikes the human body. To " tumble 
 the enemy over ten-a-penny " sounds magni- 
 ficent, but you doubt if it be war. En- 
 gagingly candid is the remark, " Remember 
 me to old Bill. I expect he'll say I'm a liar, 
 but if I live I'll show you my bayonet." 
 This is to prove a feat of bloody derring-do. 
 
 It is unusual to have modern warfare 
 likened to " rabbit-shooting," and the flight 
 of a troop-horse from a bursting shell is 
 probably a very different performance from 
 the "gallop of a Derby winner." Still, each 
 allusion suggests the picture which is in the 
 writer's mind. Nothing is left to the imagi- 
 nation by the corporal who ranks himself 
 among " Bush Baptists and other fancy 
 religions," in order to evade Sunday service. 
 Dear Christian Atkins ! 
 
 His mood is more chastened when he says, 
 about the supreme effort to recapture the 
 guns at Colenso, " You might as well have 
 tried to take a gentleman's honour from 
 him." Such is the note of noble gravity 
 with which the common soldier faces a warm 
 i8
 
 Arms and the Man 
 
 corner. The casual reader of his letters 
 might think him a figure of circumstances, of 
 surroundings. So are we all. But under 
 the raw language of Atkins lie his principles 
 of conduct, their foundation sure. They are 
 as bright as the buttons on his Sunday red 
 coat, for they are the lining to his heart. 
 
 Hear him, all generous, on his opponents 
 in the field. Hear him talk of the medals 
 he will lay at the feet of father and mother, 
 making them proud folk. Hear him about 
 his country and the larger duties. You 
 understand then the sort of lights by which 
 he steers. 
 
 They begin and end in good citizenship. 
 
 19
 
 II.— WHAT CAMPAIGNING MEANS 
 
 Its marches and bivouacs^ its commonplaces and surprises, its 
 trials and vagrant joys : altogether a singular school oj 
 experience. 
 
 WE get from the soldier a human 
 picture of what it is to march, to 
 bivouac, to be a campaigner. 
 
 He laughs or growls as things govern him, 
 like the rest of us. He halloos forward, or 
 flings a cry over his shoulder. He stares 
 hard at the future, into which he cannot see, 
 and rolls a fugitive eye back upon the past, 
 rapidly getting blurred. 
 
 What feelings fill a man who is sharpening 
 his bayonet on the edge of a campaign ? 
 They are many. Others may have been 
 called before him, and as he goes south he 
 meets a ship bearing some of them north. 
 20
 
 5 -a 
 I?- 
 
 
 
 
 ! J 
 
 ic- 

 
 What Campaigning Means 
 
 " It is the Avoca, and, as if there should 
 be something to cheer us up a bit, she is 
 loaded with wounded returning from South 
 Africa," 
 
 Bandages, slings, crutches ; here is so much 
 waste of war being towed to the haven of 
 home. But suddenly there rises from the 
 north-bound transport a great cheer, and it 
 swings over the sea. That is the voice of 
 war's wreckage, that its answer to those who 
 would merely pity. 
 
 Next, to the open veldt ; not actual fight- 
 ing, but the advance in search of it. Hopes 
 are high while the sun shines, but come the 
 rain in bucketfuls, and they fall. " One of 
 our fellows," we have the record, *' has just 
 asked his chum how he would like to be at 
 home in front of a cheery fire, with plenty of 
 tobacco, a comfortable chair, a book and a 
 drink.''" A pretty fancy, but its reception 
 is so fierce that an estrangement follows. 
 
 By morning the world is gay again, and 
 
 Atkins is saying to himself, about a soldier's 
 
 Hfe on the veldt, " Oh, it's all right ; you 
 
 have lots of variety, and that's what most 
 
 21
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 people sigh for." He worries, though, over 
 the variety of climate and country in South 
 Africa, ever a land of surprises. " Healthy 
 but beastly," is one verdict; "you get soaked 
 and go to sleep in the open air. You wake 
 up as fresh as a daisy. Strange, isn't it ? " 
 But go somewhere else, and the complaint is 
 the absence of rain, and the frequency of dust 
 storms ; or, that they have a bad habit of 
 visiting a camp on the heels of each other. 
 Over goes the colonel's tent, his belongings 
 have a game of hide-and-seek, and he finds it 
 hard to clothe dignity in pyjamas. 
 
 " Red sand, black sand, grey sand, white 
 lime sand, — sand ; " that is a guardsman's 
 analysis of the sand storm. " Yes, sand for 
 the eyes, sand for the mouth, sand for the 
 hair — all sand. And the rain ! It makes 
 you imagine the earth turned upside down, 
 and somebody pouring water in at the other 
 end." The ever-cheerful Atkins consoles 
 himself with his popular songs, not for- 
 getting the benediction, " Onward, Christian 
 soldiers ! " 
 
 It forms part of a Sunday service to which 
 
 22
 
 What Campaigning Means 
 
 a Highlander takes us on the veldt, with the 
 heavens for church. This Celt falls to think- 
 ing of his own fair village in Scotland, and 
 how it will be at that moment. The familiar 
 folks, all in their Sunday best, will be stream- 
 ing to church ; they will be exchanging the 
 gossip as they stand in the grave-yard waiting 
 for the bell to stop ; or they will already be 
 in their several pews watching the minister's 
 search for his spectacles. Has he forgotten 
 them ? In his breast pocket ^ No. In his 
 coat-tail pocket ? No, In the Bible to mark 
 his text ^ No. Astride his nose all the 
 time ! Ah ! Here, on the South African 
 veldt, there seems to be also the peace of 
 public worship, but a glance around reveals 
 the rifles and the bandoliers. 
 
 A Canadian is moved by the " dead 
 earnestness " of the Communion service in 
 which he takes part on Christmas morning. 
 Home is also in his heart. The chimes of 
 Montreal peal far, through the crisp Canadian 
 air ; so far that he can hear their music in 
 South Africa. His Yule-log is a blistering 
 sun, and the cathedral for Christmas Com- 
 23
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 munion a tent, wherein a rickety table, with 
 a white handkerchief spread over it, forms 
 the altar. 
 
 Thinking of home ! *' You might ask 
 Tongate to turn my garden over for me ! " 
 This is the request of a reservist to a friend, 
 and what emotions do the bald words not 
 suggest ? They show, as in a flash, the little 
 house with its fragment of ground, dear to 
 wife and weans. The whole fond scene is in 
 the heart's eye of the reservist, but he will 
 only trust himself to touch the fringe of it. 
 " Ask Tongate to turn the garden over." 
 He knows it will be done, for the alliance of 
 simple men is set on a rock. 
 
 That is a supreme consolation to the 
 married soldier, called away from the land 
 of his own fireside. We have the passage, 
 " For the sake of you, and our little darling, 
 I look after myself as well as I can, but I 
 will do my duty for Queen and country." 
 What better catechism of conduct could 
 there be, than one in which family ties and 
 national duty meet ? They are the twin 
 elements of patriotism, a man's home being 
 the portal to his country. 
 24
 
 what Campaigning Means 
 
 The incidence of war touches the married 
 soldier in many ways. " Most of us married 
 men," says a Welsh Kusilier, " buy golden 
 syrup to eat with our bread, and I really 
 think it's the best thing for us — anyhow, I 
 enjoy it." He is referring to the little 
 luxuries which sweeten Atkins's tooth, and 
 which he finds it so hard to get at some 
 periods of the campaign. " Fall in for your 
 rum ! " A man of veteran service repeats 
 the order to his friends, and adds, " Of 
 course we are all there in drill time." He 
 laments that he gets no beer, and then 
 throws out the suggestive hint, " So we'll 
 have a lot of mild-and-bitter to come when 
 we return." 
 
 Transport does not always tread on the 
 heels of the soldier, nor is the running 
 stream ever beside him when he wants to 
 drink. He has the full stomach, or the 
 empty stomach, as circumstances and the 
 gods of the commissariat may decree. When 
 all is well with him he is eloquently silent ; 
 when affairs go wrong, he proclaims it, 
 which characteristics are common to man- 
 25
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 kind. At some periods Atkins finds so 
 many temptations to complain — his word is 
 " grousing " — that an evident despair settles 
 upon him. But the mood is transient. 
 
 On the road to Colenso, the troops would 
 appear to be, in good part, their own cooks. 
 We hear of them carrying bundles of wood 
 tied to their belts, with which to light a fire 
 and brew tea while halting. " We returned 
 the compliment and partook of a ' billy ' of 
 tea and a raw onion for supper." This is a 
 banquet to the hungry warrior. 
 
 At night scores of fires gleam on a hill-face, 
 and when Atkins has cooked and eaten the 
 best faring in his knapsack, he lies down and 
 sleeps by the embers. He has no complaint 
 against "Adam's knife-and-fork boys, Nature's 
 cutlery," but has a vague notion that bully- 
 beef and dry biscuit lose their succulence 
 after a time. 
 
 An Essex soldier, having arrived at this 
 opinion, and being tired of " khaki water," 
 goes in pursuit of a mouthful of cheese. 
 " All you have to do," he records learnedly, 
 of campaign cheese in general, " is to give it 
 26
 
 What Campaigning Means 
 
 your address and it will walk there, provided 
 it does not have sunstroke on the road." He 
 means that it may melt in the heat, as a 
 snow-wreath does before the first sun of 
 summer. 
 
 Be it biscuit, or bully-beef, or cheese, 
 Atkins will go halves with a comrade as 
 hungry as himself. Behold that catholic 
 trait in how a Lancashire puts a light — a 
 light indeed ! — to the fire of an officer. 
 The latter wishes to buy a chip of wood 
 wherewith to get a blaze, and offers the 
 Lancashire a shilling for the firing. " No," 
 he answers, " but I'll give you a bit gladly. 
 We are all here to help each other." 
 
 This . admirable fellow is painfully minute 
 when he adds, " One of our men found a 
 crust of bread on the veldt, and you should 
 have seen the troops gaze at it as though it 
 were a curiosity in a museum ! " It is not 
 sent to a museum. Atkins, viewing him in 
 bulk, has his lean weeks and his fat weeks ; 
 or, to quote an Imperial Yeoman, " We have 
 our hard experiences as well as our soft 
 turns, and we try to face the rough with 
 27
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 the smooth." It is sound philosophy, and 
 to be expected from this campaigner, since he 
 waits upon a steak which is cooking in a 
 shovel, over a lazy fire. 
 
 The pursuit of war demands a square meal, 
 but the resources of the soldier are often 
 taxed to find it. A colonial scout, whose 
 larder is the veldt, rejoices in a shot sheep, 
 and the near flavour of mutton. He is 
 even hopeful of fresh beef, within the week ; 
 but anyhow he is living by the " kill, 
 cook, and eat " adventures, of which every 
 boy dreams. What more can romantic 
 youth desire ? Perhaps such a gallant, 
 though withal murderous venture, as wins 
 for a Yorkshireman the joking promise of 
 his officer that he shall be recommended for 
 the D.S.O. 
 
 " Yesterday," this quest reads, " I went to 
 a Zulu's farm and asked his daughter, who 
 was quite pretty for a black lady, how much 
 she wanted for some turkeys ? I pulled out 
 half a crown and pointed to three turkeys, 
 but she shook her head and said ' No, no ; 
 me want two sheelin.' I gave her ' two 
 28
 
 What Campaigning Means 
 
 sheelin,' then chased the three turkeys round 
 the kraal with a knob-kerrie, and returned 
 in triumph to camp." 
 
 A Highlander dances over the corpse of a 
 sucking-pig which luck has brought him, 
 stuff's it with grasses of the veldt, and 
 dines royally. He lacks what his ancestors 
 would have washed the pig down with, but 
 is content to mention the fact without re- 
 pining. His plan of dinner is quite in 
 contrast with that of a gunner who, surely, 
 must be where the sound of a gun has not 
 yet shaken the welkin. 
 
 " We are," he secretly confides, " situated 
 next to a canteen, and with a little of the 
 ' back of the hand down ' we can get a steak 
 or a liver or a chop. These with a few 
 onions and some potatoes fried in an old can, 
 make life truly worth living." 
 
 While that may be so, one would really 
 prefer the ways of the colonial scout and 
 the Highlander, who are prepared to fight 
 for their dinner, as they will be to share it 
 with friend or foe. Nevertheless, it may be 
 the same gunner, who, being in charge of a 
 29
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 water-cart, with orders to guard the contents 
 strictly, turns his back upon a dog-thirsty, 
 beseeching soldier. The latter seizes his 
 chance and drinks, as it is meant he shall ; 
 drinks to his own health, and that of the 
 gunner who cannot see behind, having no 
 eyes there. 
 
 Atkins cries loud and often for water, of 
 which the karoo yields so little, and such 
 brackish stuff. " Never waste any water 
 if you can help it," counsels a trooper who 
 has lost himself and is black of tongue and 
 lips. " We had to skim the green stuff off 
 the top," says a guardsman ; " lizards, frogs, 
 and eels were there, but the lot would have 
 gone down if we hadn't been able to fish 
 them out." A South Wales Borderer makes 
 a filter of his teeth ; an officer thinks he had 
 better not wash in the drinking water ; and 
 a driver of the Army Service Corps has a 
 strange adventure in the arid, baking region 
 of the Modder. 
 
 He is on the march across country, for it 
 is while so engaged, in the dry season, that 
 the water problem fastens upon Atkins. " To- 
 30
 
 What Campaigning Means 
 
 wards daybreak I must have got light-headed ; 
 beautiful rivers and waving trees were in 
 sight." Thus he dreams. A road seems to 
 lead towards them ; a road, oddly enough, 
 which is paved with cartridges. How can 
 that be ^ Now reality disturbs the dream, 
 and a Kaffir's shout, " Boss, dere's de Modder 
 ribber," arouses the dreamer. *' Where ? " 
 To the left are real trees, meaning the pre- 
 sence of water, and the driver, instinct 
 guiding his path, staggers on in search of it. 
 He runs against a tree, collapses into an 
 earth-hole, but comes at last to the edge of 
 the warm, muddy water. " I plunged my 
 head into it, drank my fill, and laughed like 
 a baby with its milk bottle." Next he has 
 a souse in the stream. 
 
 " It was like heaven after being in hell all 
 day," is the sensation experienced by another 
 bather, after a day of war and sweat. He 
 also drinks his fill — a gallon he estimates — 
 and subsequently helps to drag very strange 
 fish out of the river. However, a sapper 
 reassures us with accounts of evening swim- 
 ming parties on the Modder — 
 3i
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 " It is amusing to watch the beginners 
 trying to do their little bit. One is enjoying 
 himself O K, but wanders beyond his depth 
 and there's a cry from the bank, ' Mind 
 those whiskers or you'll sink.' He smiles 
 fatally, goes under with a gurgle, and has to 
 be hauled out." 
 
 These arrogant whiskers are the growth 
 of campaigning, for the bayonet cuts out the 
 razor. " Oh dear me," wails a soldier with 
 a fine stubble, " my chin would bring no 
 discredit to the hat-stand of a well-appointed 
 hall." A dragoon entreats his well-wishers, 
 " Don't send any more ' boy's 'bacca ' — fags 
 and such like — because we all grow whiskers 
 here." He needs " twist " to taste his 
 tongue, inside its rampart of whiskers. 
 
 We get tales of Atkins looking himself up 
 in the lid of a tin can, and being frightened 
 at the sight. " I tell you I do look a fair 
 stage villain ; I have whiskers which nearly 
 reach down to my waist." We hear eternally 
 of the picturesque effects which forced 
 marches and rough country, produce upon 
 boots and breeches and tunics. " Why, 
 32
 
 what Campaigning Means 
 
 we're like mountain brigands, or rather like 
 a regiment of Rip van Winkles," A BufF 
 compares himself to a Crusoe, but finds 
 solace in the view that others are in the 
 same plight. 
 
 " Oh we do look nobs," exclaims an 
 amateur tailor whose clothes are out at 
 places too numerous to mention. A colonial 
 gets into his boots gently, lest he should push 
 the soles off, but a Cockney exclaims to the 
 world, " What a show we'd make for recruit- 
 ing ! We'd knock the sergeants at St. George's 
 barracks altogether ! " No doubt, if we 
 have regard to the melancholy tidings of a 
 Borderer who, amid the ongoings following 
 the relief of Kimberley, has to sit still and 
 hide his nakedness. 
 
 Here is the comedy of war, and does a 
 Royal Engineer who confesses to wearing 
 three shirts at once, take us from it ? He 
 cannot carry them as a bundle, being well- 
 laden otherwise, and so he puts on the three. 
 
 " When the top one is dirty I'll chuck him 
 away, and wear the next ; then the third, all 
 of which will save washing." Yet Atkins 
 33 D
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 finds as much diversion in the washhig of 
 his shirts, as in a Modder swim. He wears 
 buff as gracefully as khaki. 
 
 A sergeant of the Howitzers has read 
 Dickens, and recalls the case of the poor 
 lodger who swilled his shirt and waited 
 while it dried. Atkins, on the banks of the 
 Modder, fills in the wait with a game at 
 penny nap. Once the enemy disturbs the 
 washing day, it may be to his own confusion, 
 and in the hurry there is to welcome him, 
 shirts get mixed. The wash-tub with a rifie 
 lying beside it ; the river bath, with a com- 
 rade, revolver in hand, keeping watch ! 
 These be fresh sensations to place against 
 the commonplaces of soldiering, nor are they 
 alone. 
 
 The mail-bag from the campaign in Natal 
 has news of hailstones big as hen-eggs and 
 harder, of scorpions and tarantula spiders. 
 Atkins has no use for the hailstones, and 
 thinks them too serious to joke about, but 
 the scorpions and tarantulas stir his sporting 
 instincts. " Sometimes we get a specimen of 
 each, and placing them two in a box, watch 
 34
 
 What Campaigning Means 
 
 a battle to the death." The scorpion, being 
 bigger, is invariably the victor, but the 
 struggle does not lack excitement. The 
 cockpit is to the '* Open Veldt Hotel, pro- 
 prietors. Breeze & Co.," what a bowling 
 alley is to an hostelry in a London suburb. 
 
 At first an attempt is made to extract 
 sport from the flies, but it is abandoned in 
 despair. " Everything," a letter - writer 
 curses heroically, " is flies, flies, flies ! In 
 the tea, in the soup, on the meat, on the 
 bread ! For breakfast, for dinner, for tea ! 
 They were the plague of Pharaoh once ; 
 now they are the plague of the soldiers in 
 South Africa." The discovery is made byj 
 a Middlesex that the flies have a preference 
 for new-comers, for those whom the cam- 
 paign has not toughened into leather. It is 
 an intelligible choice. 
 
 A Middlesex wants fly-papers, " catch 'em 
 alive o's," served out with the rations, and 
 strong measures taken against the mosquitoes. 
 They sting as if they were armed with spurs, 
 but their song to the night is more melodious 
 than that of an army of frogs. A dirge 
 35
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 addressed by them to a campful of yeomen 
 is tolerated, but when they crawl below the 
 rugs, and clamber coldly across the sleepers, 
 boots and bayonets are seized in self-defence. 
 Great is the execution, but what matters it, 
 if, as with the flies, a myriad of living frogs 
 come to the funeral of the dead. 
 
 Contrast these gleanings from a far-flung 
 field, so rich and poor in climates, with the 
 happy lot of a C. I. V, He is doing duty 
 at some outpost on the Orange River, and 
 quite imagines he might be looking on the 
 Thames from Richmond Hill. Masses of 
 yellow flowers make a garden of the place, 
 and gorgeous birds which sing not, and 
 others less gorgeous which do, fill the bushes 
 with life. " No boating party at Windsor 
 or Epping," he continues, " were ever 
 happier than we fellows at picquet on the 
 Orange River." War has its peace spots, 
 its back waters, which the pour of blood does 
 not redden. 
 
 A regular of few words is indifi^erent 
 where the tide of strife carries him, his grand 
 wonder being that he grows absolutely fat on 
 36
 
 What Campaigning Means 
 
 nothing. " I am A i myself," he says, " and 
 putting on weight. It seems funny, but I'm 
 getting an awful size. I suppose it's the 
 fresh air and plenty of exercise." He rises 
 early to catch the dew of the veldt, where- 
 with to wash his face. Or rather it is a lick 
 and a promise, and not even that if the sun 
 has already come forth, as from the nether 
 furnace. But notwithstanding this early 
 rising our regular goes on getting stout, and 
 he may be left in the process. 
 
 Turn to the supreme comfort which 
 Atkins has amid all that befalls him ; and 
 who can fail to guess it ? It is his pipe. 
 We find it ever in his cheek, or his cheek 
 crying for it. There is Ladysmith, where 
 the besieged smoke dried tea-leaves in default 
 of anything with a truer taste. When events 
 are at high pressure, men, if they be smokers, 
 want the silent companionship. Dower 
 Atkins thus, and the world may revolve or 
 stand still, for all he cares. 
 
 *' You talk of shot and shell," a soldier 
 confides, " but I give little notice to them 
 if I can get a smoke. Then I'm happy." 
 37
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 And Providence in another sense may be in 
 the pipe. " While lying there," a smoker 
 records, " I lifted my head to fill my pipe. 
 Why, would you believe it, a bullet hit the 
 very place where my head had been, and 
 banged flat on my rifle. Said I to myself, 
 said I, ' That smoke saved my life.' " 
 
 A corporal of a Maxim-gun detachment 
 had intended to drop smoking, " But I'm 
 jolly glad I brought some 'baccy with me. 
 It's the only thing we have." Not every one 
 is so fortunate, else we should not hear of 
 the substitutes for it, or the plaintive, 
 " Think of men breaking up their clay pipes 
 and chewing them in order to get a taste of 
 tobacco." Essentially Atkins is a man of 
 feeling, and his long cry for " a smoke " is a 
 sign of this. To him it is the friend of his 
 rounds by morn or night, the friend with 
 whom he can talk and always be understood. 
 
 So fortified, he gaily rides the veldt, read- 
 ing the face of that strange land, knowing 
 not the day nor the hour. 
 
 38
 
 III.— BATTLE IN BEING 
 
 The series of pictures it is to the eye, its near rattle and 
 far roar to the car, and its wearing strain upon the 
 nerves. 
 
 WHAT, to the soldier, is a battle in. 
 being ? How does it seem to 
 him as he beholds it ? How does he feel 
 when he is in the heart of it ? One picture 
 comes of vision, the other through sensa- 
 tion, but the two are inseparable. We 
 approach them by gradual stages. 
 
 *' Old man," a volunteer salutes a friend 
 at home, *' when you are comfortable in your 
 bed, have a thought for Bill doing his lonely 
 sentry-go, with the ground for his bed and 
 the starry heavens for his covering, fifty 
 rounds in his bandolier, and a Lee-Metford 
 his close companion." 
 
 Sentry-go on the veldt ! It is the road to 
 39
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 the battle, part of the training which brings 
 Atkins to the ordeal. It has variety. A 
 sentry reports the countersign one night to 
 be " weary," and hints that somebody meant 
 to be sarcastic. " Why not weary, worn and 
 sad .'' " he asks. 
 
 Another sentry comes to a halt on hearing 
 a noise in a thicket, followed by the flight 
 of a shadow from it. He challenges, gets 
 no reply, challenges anew, and is about to do 
 so a third time, when the shadow appears 
 again, and he fires. There is a squeal, and 
 next morning a pig is wandering round the 
 camp on three legs, carrying the fourth. 
 " Who shot the pig ? " is the question, and 
 our sentry has to meet the laughter of his 
 comrades and the anger of the owner, a 
 neighbouring farmer. 
 
 A camp is roused by a false alarm and 
 loses its night's sleep ; which is still more 
 experience for Atkins, shaping him to his 
 surroundings. The occasion of the alarm 
 has been a stampede of mules, foolish beasts 
 that way, and the cry of a dreaming man, 
 *' They are on us ! " Soon the mules are in 
 40
 
 Battle in Being 
 
 obedience and peace, and, moreover, the 
 dominion of Atkins over the lower kingdom 
 goes wider. He learns to harness Nature to 
 sentry-go, to make even the wild animals 
 his allies. In the daytime he watches the 
 baboons at play on the hills, knowing they 
 will be the first to scent the approach of an 
 enemy. When the guardian baboon cries 
 shrilly, and his flock scamper for the kloof, 
 Atkins comes to " 'tention " and fondles his 
 rifle. 
 
 " Our men on sentry-go," an Essex private 
 says of the outposts, " are sniping away like 
 old boots, and I can assure you we enjoy the 
 sport immensely. But don't run away with 
 the idea that we do all the sniping, for I can 
 assure you the Boers do their fair share." 
 
 A shell may even arrive with a hiss and a 
 bang, at the moment Atkins is crooning to 
 himself, "Let 'em all come." He means it, 
 the lust for a fight being in him most of all 
 when he has trudged a long road in search of 
 it. The wind has been in his heels, and he 
 prays for the whirlwind to break. Those 
 marches are an asset of battle — an asset 
 41
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 realised beforehand, though often there may 
 be no better return for them than skirmishes. 
 " You have no idea what this war is Hke," 
 says a lancer. '* You are getting along 
 under the hills, and all at once there is a 
 shower of bullets, just like a shower of 
 hailstones, and you can't see anybody." 
 Perhaps the hum of the Mausers is accom- 
 panied by the plop-plop-plop-plop-plop, five 
 shots in quick succession, of a quick-firer. 
 The kopjes speak, and are spoken back to 
 sharply ; but let an artilleryman catch the 
 echoes : 
 
 " They start ping-ping, pop-pop, bang- 
 bang-bang ; presently off" goes some one's 
 head." " Good shot ! " calls somebody 
 else ; " have another go at him. That's 
 got him." 
 
 These are the stages of battle to Lady- 
 smith, to Kimberley, to Mafeking. Troopers 
 are begrimed like dustmen, the gay tartans of 
 Highlanders are daubed out of recognition ; 
 all is drab khaki, alike in colour and feeling. 
 " We were so worn out that when we halted, 
 some of us would fall asleep as we stood, and 
 42
 
 Battle in Being 
 
 tumble down." There we have the toil of 
 the march, but it is less trying to bear than 
 darkness lying over a strange region which 
 must be covered before dawn, if the surprise 
 is to succeed. 
 
 " No one is allowed to speak, to strike a 
 light, to smoke ; we move along like a deaf 
 and dumb army." 
 
 That is the advance at Magersfontein, 
 from which, as from the wide campaign, we 
 have the complaint, " You cannot see the 
 enemy. He shoots at you, but you look in 
 vain for him. It is fighting against rocks. 
 You have nobody to shoot at, damn it ! " 
 Atkins demands with indignation, " Why 
 doesn't the Boer come out into the open, and 
 fight us fair in the teeth .? " But later he 
 himself is mastering the kopjes and the 
 krantzs, as natural fortresses. 
 
 Often we hear of men crying with rage 
 because they cannot see an enemy to fire at. 
 Bullets sing out of space, to hit, or to miss 
 and pass on with a moan of disappointment. 
 Where are they who snap the eager triggers 
 home ^ The hills answer only in vague 
 43
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 numbers ; the kopjes hold phantom men who 
 fire rifles, raising not a wrack of smoke to 
 tell from where. " You have nobody to 
 shoot at, damn it ! " 
 
 " It gets on the nerves," somebody ex- 
 presses the thing, " this idea of an invisible 
 foe, who lies in the grass, or behind a rock, 
 and shoots, shoots, shoots. An English 
 soldier of imaginative mind, might come to 
 think of the enemy as a sort of nineteenth- 
 century invention, a vapour, like the colour- 
 less smoke of the new powder, or a demon 
 or an essence ; and when he had thought all 
 that, he would go mad unless a Boer bullet 
 caught him, as it catches so many, nose 
 down in the sand, when they are hiding 
 behind sage bushes." 
 
 Modern warfare is an eerie trade. A 
 Northampton enters it to describe what has 
 befallen him during the hottest part of an 
 advance. As he and others lie on the 
 ground they show their helmets above cover, 
 and thereupon Mauser bullets crack through 
 them. Men on some distant hillside are 
 calmly taking aim at the headgear, the 
 44
 
 Battle in Being 
 
 owners of which know no more. The 
 invisible is full of awe, but more immediately 
 a cause for grumbling, hot as the rifle fire 
 itself. 
 
 " The Boers," we get this vignette, " were 
 pouring Mauser bullets into us as quick as 
 peas ; we saw nothing, yet could not have 
 been quicker served in a cookshop." 
 
 It is said lightly, but not unthinkingly ; 
 he means it is easier to look death in the face 
 than to blindly await it. Hearken to the 
 devilish scream of a big shell, a sound 
 disturbing to the staunchest nerve. First 
 the shell outruns its noise, then the noise 
 creeps up upon it, and finally, if the flight 
 of the missile be long enough, the report 
 gets ahead. So a listener in his earth 
 burrow, marshals the procession of a Creusot 
 shell through the air. 
 
 With all this discipline for battle, this 
 breeding to its bugle call, there goes the 
 merry touch, the jocund heart. " Better 
 than a pantomime," is the saying we have 
 about an attack upon a kopje, where it is a 
 matter of jumping from rock to rock, " just 
 45
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 like the Zulus." Smoking, laughing, the 
 shouting of one to another, but nowhere an 
 opening for cavalry, " All you can do in 
 this country," a hussar bewails, " is to sit 
 still and stick it, whereas in any other 
 country you could have a dab in." He 
 needs to have splendid resignation. 
 
 " Look out below ! " It is a shout from 
 the sentry atop a kopje which, for the good 
 of affairs in general, has been held three 
 weary weeks against splashes of shell-fire. 
 The garrison are cooking, and they have 
 just time to drop their slices of meat into 
 the fire and fly to the safety of their 
 burrows. Whiz-z-z, bang, crash ! The 
 shell has burst, its fumes outrage the 
 atmosphere ; and now to turn the joints, and 
 get back to cover before the next shot ! 
 The bobbing out and in has its risks, besides 
 its terrors ; the risks which curious rabbits 
 run when dogs are near their holes. 
 
 "Good God!" exclaims a man, caught 
 
 out of shelter, but when the shell has blown 
 
 itself to pieces he is still safe, and he calmly 
 
 proceeds to gather up the fragments. He 
 
 46
 
 Battle in Being 
 
 argues that these are his by all manner of 
 right, and nobody is anxious to come into 
 the open and dispute the claim with him. 
 " Very often," a Welshman writes of such 
 an experience, " we have a firework entertain- 
 ment, much the same as you get at home. 
 There is this difference, however, that we 
 are content to behold it from behind rocks." 
 " A game of draughts ! " It is to this a 
 driver of the Royal Artillery compares an 
 advance against the enemy, who, being driven 
 from one position, simply occupy the next. 
 But combat, sullen, savage, a giant, one day 
 leaps from these battlings, and we go with 
 Atkins and his friends to behold it, in such 
 spirit towards gallantry as the following 
 witness : 
 
 " To see those great bearded warriors 
 charging up a mountain, taking death as 
 nothing, was a privilege worth ten years of 
 ordinary life. In the moment of battle 
 there is something godlike in these men ; 
 their faces change to iron, and they seem 
 Fate itself ! " 
 
 It is a gilt-edged tribute to the British 
 47
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 infantry, and well earned, but how differently 
 a colonial trooper phrases his praise. His 
 opinion of the rank and file rises on acquaint- 
 ance with them, like a thermometer set 
 against a warm sun. He calls them grand, 
 and clinches this deliverance with the odd, 
 unexpected remark, " They ' moon ' along 
 as if they were going to have a drink." 
 Here is the pinnacle of eulogy in the 
 language of the street. 
 
 But follow the infantry as they make 
 battle, if it be possible, for they seem to be 
 little brown ants on the plain. And when 
 they stop your eye loses them. So testifies 
 a spectator, and another confirms him in the 
 sentence, " You have a lot of little moving 
 dots, mere lumps of mud, coming creeping 
 along the scorched and dusty ground." 
 There is a shrill whistle, and the lumps of 
 mud assume the form of men who rush up 
 the side of a kopje. It is a set battle, and 
 as a gunner, carried av/ay by the sight, 
 exclaims, " Talk about a football match, 
 it isn't in it." 
 
 He is probably thinking of Elandslaagte, 
 48
 
 Battle ill Being 
 
 with its beat of drum, blare of bugle, and 
 quick step to the bagpipes ; a field hastening 
 to close quarters and hot blood. Paardeberg 
 is not all in that style ; it stands also for the 
 new model. " I fancy it's a wash out for 
 Cronje, now he's surrounded," says a High- 
 lander. Washout! How expressive ! "Take 
 a basin," the contrast is continued by another 
 Highland hand, " put Cronje and his men 
 at the bottom of it, and Roberts and his 
 guns round the edge, and there you have 
 the situation." That is how Paardeberg 
 looks, and we are given an equally clear 
 picture of an out-flanking operation. 
 
 To right and left clouds of horsemen 
 stretch away, and when they have gone far 
 enough, they will begin to come together 
 again. The obstacle to a direct advance sits 
 tight, but only for a little, because to linger 
 unduly, might be to stay altogether. These 
 doings are not for the eye so much as for the 
 mind's eye, not a spectacle glowing with 
 colour, but a calculation of supreme nicety. 
 Vision is limited, and modern warfare is 
 a far-spread game. It gets away from 
 49 K
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 the picturesque, though Atkins is anxious to 
 linger there, true to the glorious tints 
 of yore. 
 
 He remains a man, even if it be necessary 
 for him to be a cog in a great machine. 
 Nothing may interfere with his individuality; 
 with his keen personality. His uniform 
 does not crush the humanities out of him. 
 Is the occasion sad :' He loses comrades on 
 either side, and reflects, " This is being spared 
 if you like ! " Is the occasion laughable, 
 because decked in a splendid exaggeration ? 
 A gunner spies a bunch of the enemy 
 digging trenches, and lays his lyddite gun 
 straight at them. When the green fumes 
 have lifted he jots down the entry, " No 
 movement, poor chaps ; they dug their own 
 graves and merely wanted filling in." 
 
 " Whilst lying still and watching them," 
 another chronicler assures us, " we had a 
 competition as to how many we could ' snipe ' 
 off, and as they fell to my rifle I thought of 
 you and my other dear old chum, and said, 
 ' One for him, one for you, and one for me.' " 
 Those who curse an unseen enemy must 
 50
 
 Battle in Being 
 
 envy the man who sees so efFectually. Yet 
 may a battle, wherein all is possible, not 
 breed such things ? Whether or not, let the 
 vivid imagination add them to history. The 
 eye cannot pierce a stone wall, but that is no 
 reason why the imagination should not get 
 round a kopje. 
 
 There is no need for the exercise at 
 Colenso, of which a bandsman catches the 
 music, " The scene though terrible was grand, 
 and the crescendo in Rossini's ' William Tell ' 
 was fairly eclipsed by the effect of the guns." 
 We estimate events, however novel, however 
 strange, by the conditions of our everyday 
 life and calling. What would Colenso have 
 been like at night, in darkness instead of in 
 daylight .'' A second commentator wonders ! 
 It is splendid in the light of morning, with 
 its roll of rifle fire, its roar of cannon, its 
 bonfire of bursting shell. In the dark it 
 would, the writer fancies, be grander, just as 
 a veldt fire seems to burn fiercer then ; but 
 always it is cruel, terrible, the magnificence 
 of hell. 
 
 How often Atkins reaches towards the 
 
 51
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 nether unknown, searching for what will 
 express his ideas on a hot battle ! A thunder- 
 storm takes up the racket of Paardeberg, 
 out-bullying even the lyddite's avalanche. 
 Atkins gives up the scene in despair of 
 finding adequate words, but only for an 
 instant, since he is soon naming it "a living 
 hell," or " hell upon earth." It smokes 
 green, fumes pollute the air, and there is the 
 low moan of the wounded. That is the still 
 small voice of battle ; the hymn which keeps 
 it human, the safeguard against savagery. 
 A man of the Modder engagement confesses 
 to "a good hard heart," but that the sight of 
 the wounded gives him a " twisting." It 
 sets him against war ; the agony of a battle 
 lingers for hours in his ears. To his un- 
 strung nerves a cart rattling on the stones 
 seems to be rifle fire, and an empty tin rolling 
 down a hill has a sound as of distant artillery. 
 There we come to the feel of battle, to its 
 pulse under the sensations. " It is grand," 
 says a Highlander, " to watch a battle, while 
 lying safe on a hill out of range, and I think 
 this accounts for the many high - falutin'
 
 Battle in Being 
 
 descriptions I liave read from time to time. 
 It wears a different aspect when you are in 
 the fighting line, with the bullets dancing 
 hornpipes around you." Such is the transi- 
 tion from Spion Kop at a distance, all illumi- 
 nations, to Spion Kop on the top, all thirst 
 and blood and death. 
 
 "Ammunition wanted!" A Lancashire 
 Fusilier, who is in the thick of Spion Kop, 
 passes the cry. *' Water wanted for the 
 wounded!" Where to get it .^ "Send 
 reinforcements for the right ! " Yes, but 
 where are they? "Then the men were on 
 the point of going for it, neck or nothing, 
 with the bayonet, when the news ran along, 
 ' Reinforcements are coming ! ' and such a 
 cheer went up. You can imagine it from men 
 who believed they were cut off ; it was soul- 
 stirring." Some, many, go under ; they drop 
 quietly, unflinchingly, concerned only to 
 imitate the mangled gunner of Ladysmith, 
 who exhorted his comrades to "Throw me 
 out of the way, lads ! " 
 
 A Warwick has his sensations of battle 
 before it actually begins, and the rest appeals 
 53
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 to him as might a parade. It is the suspense 
 that tries, the waiting on events until they 
 bring your turn of strife. Is a hill being 
 assailed ^ " There seems to be a glorious 
 fascination which draws you on and on, until 
 you either fall or gain the position." But 
 what happens to a body of men ; how is the 
 battle-picture trodden out by them ? 
 
 " Oh my ! " we hear about Belmont, 
 " thousands of bullets came flying around 
 our heads, and it was awful. Men were 
 throwing up their hands and moaning, and 
 one would cry, ' I am shot ! '" Not a lament, 
 not a lowering of courage, simply the in- 
 stinctive utterance of staggered human nature. 
 Somebody will be at his side with a sip of 
 water, and lint wherewith to bind up his 
 wound. " Get away," other wounded soldiers 
 may call ; " you are drawing all their fire 
 upon us." 
 
 The soldier feels the battle in these trage- 
 dies ; it burns itself into him as with letters of 
 a red-hot iron. A Middlesex is resting for a 
 minute during an action, so that his rifle, 
 which has grown too warm, may cool. He 
 54
 
 Battle in Being 
 
 cracks a match to light a cigarette, and a 
 colonial near by asks, " After you ? " The 
 poor fellow has raised himself on one knee 
 to grasp the match, when a Hotchkiss shell 
 blasts him, leaving a corpse where he has 
 been. On Vaal Krantz an East Surrey 
 fumbles about for stones — it is night — 
 wherewith to strengthen the shallow entrench- 
 ment. His hand lays hold of a Scottish 
 Ririeman, dead and headless. Cold is the 
 touch of that headless rifleman. 
 
 Still the marvel, to a despatch-rider, Is the 
 number of bullets that it takes to hit a man, 
 much less hit him to the death. He rides half 
 across a battlefield, bullets singing around 
 him, shells bursting everywhere, and yet he 
 is not harmed. While he gallops he has 
 a consuming purpose, and is indifferent to 
 aught else. But when he has to wait, after 
 delivering his despatch, the situation is ill to 
 bear. He dodges as a bullet flies near, but 
 agrees with the comment of an officer, " It's 
 too late to duck your head when you hear 
 the buzz ! " The fact should be known. 
 
 A pontoon bridge has to be thrown across 
 55
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 a stream in the height of a fight, and the 
 sappers have hard work at this, and a dim 
 prospect of glory from it. A Royal Engi- 
 neer makes both points clear. His captain 
 has steered the company along a donga to 
 the river bank, where the trout seem to be 
 rising to the flies ! Nay, the bubbles denote 
 Mauser bullets, but, says the captain, " It's 
 got to be done, lads ; come on ! " As they 
 grasp their tools the captain shouts, " Down !" 
 and a hail of lead blows overhead. There is 
 a lull, whereupon picks are flying again and 
 hammers are raining blows. " Down ! " 
 The vigilant machine-gun on yon eminence 
 has again sighted the workers, and is snapping 
 at them. " We got the task done in about 
 forty minutes," you learn, " and it was about 
 the worst forty minutes I ever had." Ping, 
 ping ; buz, buz ; pit, pit ; his-s-s ! but the 
 pontoon is across the stream, and strong 
 enough to carry a bayonet charge. 
 
 Atkins has a keen regard for the bayonet, 
 
 weapon of long usage and many a victory. 
 
 He holds, perhaps, that here is one weapon 
 
 of war which will not miscarry, being in his 
 
 56
 
 Battle in Being 
 
 hands, whatever may befall other arrange- 
 ments. The flash of the bayonet is to him 
 a cause in itself, a signal making the blood 
 run hot. Not enmity to any, not wishing 
 any creature hurt, but a deep pining for 
 surety in achievement — that is the feeling 
 of Atkins towards the bayonet. 
 
 He is taken with its security ; his man- 
 hood, valour to the death, is there re- 
 flected, but he realises that the bayonet is 
 going. Therefore, while he may, he bur- 
 nishes it the more, and when it has been 
 laid aside altogether, he will still keep it 
 bright. 
 
 Sentiment .'' No doubt, but sentiment is 
 not a bad holding ; it makes the soldier tread 
 leisurely when he has to retire from odds and 
 embrasures. " My heart throbbed and I felt 
 proud that I was a British soldier." Such 
 is the spirit which conquers, and which is 
 richest when it seems to have gained least. 
 
 It is the spirit, the being of many a South 
 African battle, as men gaze at each other 
 across the veldt. 
 
 57
 
 IV.— UNDER FIRE 
 
 Hozv the soldier lakes his baptism, th?e queer, subtle sensa- 
 tions attendant upon it, and t/?e subsequent fine growth 
 of indifference. 
 
 IT is a personal study, as distinct from 
 one of battle, to follow the soldier 
 under fire, asking him at various times, How 
 does it feel ? This is a matter between 
 his soul and body, something apart from the 
 military event at stake, while also part of it. 
 
 " What are those insects buzzing around } " 
 a drummer of the Gordons asks a sergeant- 
 major. " Lad," says he, " they're not 
 insects — they're bullets." The little Gordon 
 understands that he is under rifle fire at long 
 range, and another experience of this 
 reads — 
 
 " After we had gone some little way, 
 58
 
 Under Fire 
 
 we heard, as we thought, a lot of flies 
 about. But the flies were bullets, and for a 
 time we took cover behind ant-heaps." 
 
 A soldier of the ammunition column is 
 leading his pony near the Tugela, while the 
 big guns hail each other across it. Man and 
 pony are a mark for keen eyes, and very 
 often " I would hear two or three chums 
 shout ' Look out ! ' and down I had to flop 
 flat on my stomach — skirmishing order." 
 This is being under shell fire. 
 
 "It's horrid," we have the further state- 
 ment, " as mostly you can only hear the 
 whiz of the shells, without being able to see 
 them, unless they are the biggest ones ; and 
 you expect every one to hit you." 
 
 A shadow on horseback creeps up to an 
 officer of colonial scouts with the ghostly 
 whisper, "Will you kindly go and ascertain 
 if there are any Boers on those kopjes," 
 " From the centre fifteen paces, extend ! " 
 and in a long loose line they move out. 
 " Bang, whiz, zip, phut, crack, ping ! " 
 reports one of the scouts, " and everything 
 was a mixture of flying bullets and spouts 
 59
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 of dust," They have been suddenly fired 
 on, and the scene is like that. 
 
 " What's up, Charlie, old man ? " " Hit 
 on the leg somewhere," answers the nearest 
 trooper, and within a few strides he falls 
 upon the neck of his horse. " My hand 
 was in his belt, his head on my chest, there 
 was no blood, and his face was going grey." 
 Here is stage two of coming suddenly, un- 
 wittingly under fire ; an experience of which 
 a Cape Mounted Rifleman observes, " You 
 hardly knew whether to halt or retreat." 
 
 Such evidence on being under fire, leads us 
 to cross-examine Atkins in detail, and he 
 answers in ways like these : 
 
 " It's rather a curious sensation being 
 under fire for the first time, but the chief 
 thing you note is this — you're awfully hot 
 and thirsty." 
 
 " The only time I really felt inclined to 
 run away was, oddly enough, when we were 
 nearly a mile from the fighting line." 
 
 " I tell you for the first hour at Colenso I 
 was duckinor mv head for all I was worth. 
 Couldn't help it." 
 
 60
 
 Under Fire 
 
 " I suppose you think I was frightened, 
 but I was not ; never cooler in my life, nor 
 in a happier mind. It's true I felt a bit 
 queer for the first ten minutes, but I should 
 like to meet the man who wouldn't be a bit 
 timid at the start." 
 
 " It makes you feel funny when you first 
 get under fire. You are standing waiting 
 for the word to advance, thinking of nothing 
 in particular. Then your officer shouts 
 ' Forward, J Company,' and you begin to 
 march steadily towards the enemy. The 
 bullets ping, ping, and you hear the crack 
 of explosives ; you take a deep breath and 
 shiver, as when you jump into cold water." 
 
 *' At first you have a kind of gloomy 
 foreboding, next an inclination to laugh, talk 
 or hum ; but you are unable to do one or 
 the other." 
 
 "You feel queer for a few moments" ; 
 " I felt funky at the beginning " ; "I was 
 dodging the bullets for a while." 
 
 Here is the baptism of fire. The state- 
 ments about it are much alike, and so as to 
 what follows the first sensations. In some 
 6i
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 cases we have the same witnesses going on 
 with the story : — 
 
 " I gradually got used to the patter of the 
 bullets and the shrieking of the shells. One 
 gets a kind of bloodthirsty feeling which it 
 is impossible to quell." 
 
 " After the leading round, which had filled 
 us with awe, we were whistling, singing or 
 swearing. I don't believe we were in our 
 proper senses as regards our lives ; all we 
 wanted was to go on." 
 
 " A peculiar sensation takes possession of 
 you ; you feel as if you could rush at them 
 and tear them in pieces. All tiredness 
 disappears like magic when the band begins 
 to play." 
 
 " By this time their firing didn't seem to 
 have the slightest effect upon us. In fact we 
 didn't appear to realise what was going on, 
 although the bullets were dropping on all 
 sides, and the bullets were taking off our 
 whiskers." 
 
 " I have heard a lot about one being off a 
 bit when in battle, but once begun, you 
 think nothing of it. I felt just the same as 
 62
 
 Under Fire 
 
 a man does when he gets excited at a football 
 match. You seem to feel you are mad, in 
 fact ; yet the troops keep as cool as lambs." 
 
 " It has often been said, how does a 
 soldier feel in battle ? Well, for my part 
 — and a few more — it feels as if you could 
 do with a good smoke, especially of one's 
 favourite cigarettes. That is the honest 
 truth. Of course I mean after you settle 
 down to the thing." 
 
 " You see your chums falling round you, 
 and the blood gets into your head, and as 
 you approach the enemy you get down to 
 it, fix the bayonet, clench your teeth and 
 yell like a demented being. Then you are 
 among them — but after that you can't 
 remember." 
 
 No, the combatant is " fightin' mad"; 
 the smell of war is in his nostrils, the swell 
 of it in his veins. His one anxiety is where 
 to find its highest tide, his one thought 
 how to " get his own back." Being once 
 christened to the strife, it captures him, and 
 he is its servant, zealous to serve. 
 
 " Though hungry and weary when 1 went 
 63
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 into the fight," says a Northampton, " I 
 can assure you I was as happy as a school 
 boy with a new slate," " Made in Ger- 
 many," a bevy of infantry cry to a shell 
 sneezing over them ; and again, " They'll 
 keep on until they hurt somebody," When 
 a shell bursts near by it is " Oh lor ! I think 
 I picked myself up a bit at a time." 
 
 " It makes," we are told, " a tickling 
 sensation against your heart when you hear 
 a shell go over your head with a shriek. 
 But if one bursts half a dozen yards from 
 you, it makes you think your time has 
 come," Shells try the nerves more than 
 they break the bones, but is the former 
 affliction the less acute ? It is nervous 
 torture in contrast to physical torture, and 
 the suffering in either case depends upon 
 the temperament of the victim. 
 
 " It's a nasty sensation to hear the shells 
 go by," a Highlander remarks, and we have 
 the further observation, " One can hear 
 them hissing in the air fully a mile away, 
 though it seems as if they were on the top 
 of you." Back goes an English shell, 
 64
 
 Under Fire 
 
 courtesy for courtesy, and following its 
 flight with a glass a sergeant comments, 
 "Our big shells, going through the air, put 
 me in mind of a huge bird flapping its 
 wings. The Boers call our shrapnel ' hell 
 scrapers.' " 
 
 " Put a red-hot shot in a bucket of 
 water," Atkins advises, " and you'll have the 
 noise of a live shell in flight." The small 
 shells of the quick-firer are things by them- 
 selves, and measuring their arrival at so 
 many a second, he says, " Why, you might 
 be shaking pepper over your dinner. We 
 don't mind bullets, or big guns, but that 
 beast, the Pom-pom, puts the fear of God 
 into us." 
 
 Somebody, in a vivid sentence, declares it 
 to be a gun that screams as if it were a 
 woman in hysterics. After an hour or two 
 of its attentions, a soldier declares, " Dear 
 wife, here I am alive, but how that is, I'm 
 really at a loss to know." He has listened 
 to the bullets asking " Where are you ? 
 Where are you ? " He seeks to occupy his 
 mind by finding some comparison for their 
 
 65 F
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 sound, and he suggests a musical box trying 
 to play two or three tunes at the same time, 
 and finally succeeding. He learns wisdom 
 from the tick-tick, whir-whir of the ven- 
 omous Maxim on the far shoulder of the 
 kopje. When the whir-whir comes, he 
 knows that the band of cartridges is finished, 
 and that a fresh one has to be put in. 
 
 Now he may look up for a second from 
 his shelter, and greet an acquaintance who 
 has made the plunge across some yards of 
 open ground. Says the acquaintance, " I 
 was thinking of that song ' I'm expecting 
 it every minute.' " He can afford to speak 
 lightly, " to shake hands with himself," 
 having evaded the terror. But all men are 
 not so lucky. " You look round and find 
 that two or three of your comrades are down. 
 You think to yourself, Who'll be next ? 
 And you go on fighting." War is in 
 many patterns. 
 
 There is rifle fire to the left, which dins 
 
 upon the ear of a soldier as might the clatter 
 
 of a team of mules crossing a wooden bridge. 
 
 He is keen to rise and look about, when oflF 
 
 66
 
 Under Fire 
 
 goes the top of his sheltering ant-heap. It 
 is a wandering bullet, but it narrowly misses 
 a billet. No more bobbing-up from behind 
 that ant-heap ; curiosity is satisfied for the 
 time being. 
 
 It is ever present, but at Ladysmith 
 "Sighing Sarah" and "Whistling Willie" 
 proclaim their own shots from Umbalwana. 
 A sigh or a whistle, and the particular gun 
 from which the shell has come is known. 
 There appears to be almost a human element 
 in the big guns ; at least Atkins endows 
 them with an individuahty. He talks of 
 them, of what they are saying and doing, as 
 if they were alive, and indeed where has 
 man's ingenuity reached nearer to creation 
 than in these monsters ? The marvel and 
 pity of it ! 
 
 On goes the soldier, on with his parcel of 
 fight, which has now shaped itself into an 
 advance, clothed in skirmishes. A corporal 
 faints from shock — a bullet has lifted his 
 rifle out of his grasp — but soon gathers 
 himself together and rejoins the line. A 
 shell buries itself in the sand, sending a 
 67
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 cloud of it into the air, and refusing to 
 explode. *' Had it burst," a guardsman 
 records, " I should have been eating the 
 earth now." A merry grave-digger ! 
 
 " It'll be my turn in a moment," a hero 
 of Spion Kop feels sure, since so many 
 comrades lie stark beside him. However 
 he lives to exclaim, with a rifleman, *' I 
 thought it was all up, but I believe what my 
 fortune told me, that I should never die with 
 my boots on." He has not had them off for 
 weeks. Atkins has his little superstitions 
 and hugs them to his bosom, comforters 
 when his world is bleak. " I fancy," says a 
 non-commissioned officer, " I'm not destined 
 for a bullet ; anyhow I think I'll have the 
 pleasure of seeing you again. Then I'm 
 going into the Church, for I'm tired or 
 soldiering." " Bullet after bullet," another 
 tale goes, " was dropping between my legs, 
 but not one of them wounded me. I 
 thought every moment that my time had 
 come, but I'm a lucky chap." 
 
 There rises from Atkins individually, as 
 from him collectively, the complaint " I can't 
 68
 
 Under Fire 
 
 see an enemy to fire at. What sort of war 
 is this ? " " A fellow doesn't mind getting 
 plugged," a Coldstreamer puts his case, " if 
 he can see where the pills are coming from. 
 But it is a bit O.T. when all that can be seen 
 are puffs of smoke behind big rocks on the 
 top of steep hills." Aim at the smoke, and 
 when there is none to offer guidance, it is 
 blind fighting. 
 
 " We were like a lot of fools firing at 
 random," a Yorkshireman grumbles, " for, 
 not being able to see the enemy, we have to 
 feel him." It is a help towards this to have 
 a bullet splash upon the rocks and spout 
 away in angry fragments. Not much of a 
 help, but — " Yes, there goes his smoke 
 agam ! 
 
 " A beggar has been peppering at me hard 
 for the last ten minutes. I saw his smoke a 
 minute ago from a bush about three hundred 
 yards to my left front, and had a shot at it. 
 His hands flew up at the spot above the 
 bush, so I hope I've got him. He hasn't 
 fired since." 
 
 That is a sub-combat, man to man, brain 
 69
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 to brain, trigger against trigger, the modern 
 form of the hand - to - hand conflict which 
 ruled for centuries. The resources of the 
 mind conduct such a fight, whereas in days 
 of old the physical qualities struck directly 
 at each other. A nobler quality of combat, 
 is it not, than that of a machine death by 
 hurtle of shell .? 
 
 Two Carabineers are riding together when 
 a shell carries off the head of one ; the other 
 says, " It made me think a bit." A volley 
 causes a company of mounted infantry to 
 think also, for it cuts the grass before them, 
 yet, strangely enough, not a man is hit. 
 The sight of the narrow escapes, more, even, 
 than the presence of death, makes Atkins 
 reflective. Death leaves no room for debate, 
 it is the closing word ; but the dullest 
 imagination is set working by the hair- 
 breadth escape. 
 
 One Smith, of the great family, kneels 
 beside a wounded comrade, amid a wind of 
 bullets, and conjures all others within hearing 
 to lie down flat. He himself never " bobs ; " 
 the others cannot help it then, though they 
 70
 
 Under Fire 
 
 would charge a commando ; so up to the 
 heights with Smith — Smith who never 
 " bobs " ! He delights the field, and his 
 nerves are as sound as his physique. 
 
 It is not hard to delight Atkins ; he is 
 naturally happy. He salaams to himself with 
 " We're boys of the bull-dog breed," while 
 his boots are full of water. The little things 
 of life often call for most philosophy ; it is 
 they that keep sleep away — worrying, worry- 
 ing about nothing. But Atkins, when he is 
 utterly tired, goes to sleep with the roar of 
 battle for lullaby. One is impressed with 
 this, so odd does it appear on first thought. 
 But surprise vanishes at reading such accounts 
 and explanations of it as these : — 
 
 " You might not credit it, but at Modder 
 River I saw men fall asleep in the firing line, 
 fairly worn out." 
 
 " When I was lying under the enemy's 
 fire I was so fatigued that I fell asleep, but 
 I got a queer wakening, for a shell burst 
 just a few yards behind me." 
 
 " I actually slept as I lay on the ground, 
 and was duly awakened by bullets striking 
 with a ping at the side of my head." 
 
 71
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 " As I lay, stretched out under my horse, 
 so sheltered from bullets and the sun, I fell 
 fast asleep, and a lot of our fellows were 
 playing cards all the time. This may appear 
 strange to you, but everybody here was quite 
 unconcerned after the first excitement had 
 passed away." 
 
 " I dropped off to sleep. I don't know 
 how long I slept, but I was rudely awakened 
 by the scream of a shell from a Boer ' Buck- 
 up gun,' which exploded about thirty yards 
 from me, and took the right leg off one of 
 our chaps. I didn't go to sleep again." 
 
 " Some of the fellows who were thought 
 to be dead were only asleep, having been so 
 overcome that they had lain down under fire, 
 indifferent to it and everything else." 
 
 " I got tired of firing and fell sound asleep, 
 and dreamt I was down at Yarmouth, rowing 
 on the sea with two young ladies. But I 
 was woefully disappointed when I awoke, and 
 I picked up my rifle and continued firing." 
 
 And finally a sailor who is serving in the 
 heat of the Natal campaign assures us, " I 
 can't go to sleep unless there's a heavy rifle- 
 72
 
 Under Fire 
 
 fire on ; I've got that used to it." Sleep is 
 the reserve of life ; the body being exhausted, 
 it is the happy restorer. Why then, on 
 thinking it over, be surprised that the soldier 
 should fall asleep even as his finger is at the 
 trigger ^ If not sleep, what ? Perhaps this 
 plight : 
 
 " I was done up, couldn't go any further, 
 so I sat down and said all the swear words 
 I knew. I was too tired to do anything but 
 sit and cuss, and I was cussing for all I was 
 worth — which wasn't much then — when a 
 shell sailed over me and burst ten feet away. 
 It's funny, but I didn't feel a bit tired after 
 that. I forgot everything except the way 
 back, only I fancy I kept on cussing. Still, 
 I couldn't swear." 
 
 His distinction between " cussing " and 
 swearing is exquisite, but he had better have 
 slept ; for as a rifle goes hot and must cool, 
 as a gun "jams " through over-much exertion, 
 so the human body reaches its limits and 
 Nature steps in with her sweet collapse. Let 
 Atkins sleep ; he has done his day's work, 
 and he will arise a giant refreshed. It is the 
 73
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 slumber of the tired child, whom, in even 
 simplicity of character, he often resembles. 
 
 Asleep or awake, a Coldstreamer has no 
 fear of the rifle-bullet, but shells disturb 
 him. The reason would hardly be guessed — 
 " Because they cut you up so dreadfully." 
 He wants to be left whole, while he is left 
 at all, having been witness to the blowing up, 
 by a large shell, of a negro engaged in cutting 
 grass. To this dark harvester came the 
 black harvester, and carried him hence in 
 a molten embrace. 
 
 A Grenadier who has been in the path of 
 equally strange events, decides " to take no 
 more notice." However, he cannot adopt 
 that cheerful view in regard to a drought 
 from which he suffers in the throat — battle 
 parches him. Often a dry tickling of the 
 throat is mentioned as the first sensation that 
 visits a soldier who is under fire. His nerves 
 catch him that way, making themselves felt 
 where they are most delicate. To a Borderer 
 who has gone scatheless, the matter of concern 
 is greater. He asks himself is he to emerge 
 from the fight unhurt, or mayhap not 
 74
 
 Under Fire 
 
 emerge at all. He hopes, but faces the 
 alternative and thus consoles his father and 
 mother : " At least you'll know that I have 
 died a proper soldier's death." 
 
 Neither does a Northumbrian feel in the 
 humour to joke, with lead weaving unseen 
 figures overhead. But he is willing to smile 
 at *' those reckless devils" who do ; to laugh 
 at their cat-calls, " Over the top," " Four 
 yards short," as bullets tear up the ground. 
 They make lively companionship. Talana 
 Hill offers us a private whose confession is, 
 " I never thought I should see anybody at 
 home again, but thank goodness I never 
 funked it. I seemed to be in a trance all 
 the time, still I never forgot to do my duty." 
 No ; for a wounded friend, whom he has 
 gathered into his arms, is there killed. 
 
 A man tells us, of a fight, that " I hardly 
 knew what I was doing." A lance-corporal 
 recollects, of red Magersfontein, " My only 
 thought was waiting to be hit, and wondering 
 where it would be." He has accepted what 
 he judges to be the inevitable, yet quarrels on 
 a detail. It is a failing we have, and the small 
 75
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 peculiarities of human nature are so secure 
 that nothing, not war, not love, can interrupt 
 their set routine. A Con naught sighs for 
 another battle, even if it were to leave no 
 Connaughts, since it would be a stroke back 
 for that which struck down the colonel. 
 Personal devotion, affection ! War blows 
 these fires rosy, so tempering its blasts of 
 doom and destruction, its rushing whirlwind 
 of hell. 
 
 How the bullets ply amid it all ! An 
 engineer counts those licking the veldt 
 between his legs, but never, happily, the one 
 which does not lick the veldt. A brother in 
 trade leans on his tools to pass the opinion, 
 " You would be surprised at the way our 
 infantry face death. Why, they laugh and 
 crack jokes, accepting all as a picnic, going 
 at it with a dash which nothing stops." 
 
 A surgeon offers us the battlefield gleam, 
 " Bullets danced around us, and I felt a kind 
 of solemn disregard, as I had been exposed to 
 greater dangers before." To him there is 
 passed the message, *' Doc, you're wanted ; 
 there's a man hit on your left." "Doc" 
 76
 
 Under Fire 
 
 leaps from the ground, but it is whiz — whiz 
 — whiz ; now by his head, now all around. 
 Still it is paradise — he says that — to move 
 about, after the tension of lying still on the 
 war-mown ground. Now standing, now 
 running, a bit " fightin' mad " and wholly 
 indifferent — thus the surgeon bears himself 
 to the side of his patient. 
 
 " Under fire " is made up of all manner of 
 experiences ; it is to march through a whole 
 new life within, maybe, a few hours. You 
 have a C.I.V. who is being briskly shot at, 
 and whose feelings, as best he can analyse 
 them, are much the same as those of a bird 
 threatened by a snake. Sough — whiz — ping ! 
 It is the music of the rattler, with more than 
 the rattler's sting in it. Or you have a 
 Rimington abruptly brought to a halt by 
 half a dozen rifle barrels that gape at him. 
 He has his horse round in a trice and the 
 spurs into its side, and as he rides for 
 deliverance he moralises strangely : 
 
 " They say that when you are in extreme 
 danger all your past life flashes upon you. 
 The only thing I could think of as I galloped
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 away, was the colour of my horse's mane. It 
 reminded me of the hair of a girl I once knew 
 in Johannesburg." 
 
 And that is being " under fire," with the 
 odds against the winning of yon corner where 
 the sun trembles, now light, now shadow. 
 
 78
 
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 H 
 
 s
 
 v.— THE COMBAT DEEPENS 
 
 Thrills of the charge^ the shock of close grips when men are 
 '''■fightin' mad" and the cold deadline ss of the long-range 
 duel. 
 
 1^ HOUGH the shock of old-time war- 
 fare, blade against blade, has left us, 
 yet our soldier, and his friend the enemy, 
 often get near enough to smell each other's 
 breath. It is thus at Glencoe, at Elands- 
 laagte, and in some of the fights towards the 
 relief of Kimberley and Ladysmith. 
 
 Of the deeps of combat in that sense we 
 catch blasts which stir the latest military 
 science. According to it, the determining 
 hour of battle, the crisis that shapes victory 
 or the reverse, lies elsewhere. That crisis 
 is when rifle-fire stops an advance, or, if it 
 be part of advance, sweeps all before it ; 
 79
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 when the cannon pound so truly that one side 
 is overborne. Miles tie defeat to victory, 
 not yards as of old. Mostly, the field is cold 
 as the victor reaches it, and altogether the 
 manner of victory and defeat has been 
 revised. 
 
 Yes, but the colour, the movement, the 
 elan of the charge are still the heroic poetry 
 of war, and so will remain. The charge is 
 war visible, roaring, alive, with quick, certain 
 returns, the gods of war having it out ; not 
 a dull, deadly game at a far-flung range. So 
 its glamour remains great, the thing itself 
 puissant, decisive, at many a turning in the 
 campaign. The new military science and the 
 Old Adam are both attendant, then, as we 
 enter with the soldier upon his tensest 
 moments. 
 
 " Real fighting, if you have the battle-fever 
 on," a fighter says from experience, pro- 
 duces the most wonderful, indescribable emo- 
 tion. I won't say that you enjoy killing and 
 wounding, but it is an overwhelming, trium- 
 phant feeling to know that the man behind 
 yonder sanger, at whom you have been 
 80
 
 The Combat Deepens 
 
 potting, and who, likewise, has been pursuing 
 the same recreation with regard to you, has 
 at last finished his course, and that, instead 
 of the vanquished, you are the exultant 
 victor. No thought of mourning friends 
 dims the glory of the bayonet-charge, or 
 lessens for a moment the mad intoxication 
 of the last pursuit after a vanquished foe." 
 
 It is the return to the abyss of primitive 
 Nature, the unloosening of the straps and 
 strait-waistcoat of civilisation ; it is being, 
 once again, '* fightin' mad." " Each man," 
 comes the after-echo of a charge, " was 
 properly mad." " You said, ' Be brave,' " 
 another soldier writes ; " why you cannot be 
 anything else. Every man's eye seems to 
 strike fire, and you are mad for the time 
 being and you feel as strong as a lion." 
 These be the close, felling blows of combat, 
 hard and heavy, and to the death ; but 
 earlier there is the weary, toilsome advance, 
 training for them. 
 
 A stray sheet of paper scribbled in pencil 
 between the spurts forward, emerges from 
 Colenso. " A line may interest you from 
 8i G
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 the battlefield," it reads. " We attacked at 
 dawn and have been slowly advancing since 
 then. We are now four thousand yards 
 from the Boer position, and the shell-fire is 
 terrific. We have about fifty guns ; they the 
 same. Shells bursting all around. I've just 
 got a very good photo of one which fell 
 thirty yards off, behind me. This ought to 
 be about the biggest battle of the whole 
 show." Here is the touch of events in the 
 balance, as they seem to one who is stalking 
 among them. He is in the post of honour, 
 with those who are to ford the Tugela, and 
 as he moves forward he adds to his impres- 
 sionist sketch : 
 
 " Our big naval guns, with lyddite, must 
 be doing a good deal of damage. They 
 plough up the ground for yards round. 
 Pheugh ! It's blooming hot ! and a wade 
 through the Tugela will be rather enjoyable 
 — if the bullets aren't too thick." 
 
 Now " it is too warm to write more as we 
 
 are under a heavy rifle-fire ; " and with that, 
 
 this fragment, full-scented of the battle, 
 
 abruptly ends. Roughly abrupt is a picture 
 
 82
 
 The Combat Deepens 
 
 of the same advance which a common soldier 
 draws for us. He sees and feels at large, 
 not in detail. " Why," he says, " between 
 the moans of the wounded, and the bullets 
 flying, it was all right ! " He speaks sin- 
 cerely, but soliloquises, " It's no good being 
 afraid of bullets. Nor am I ; just they 
 shake you up a bit." He gathers himself 
 together, hacks along with his company, and 
 is brought to the ground by two wounds. 
 His hand drips blood, a hole is drilled 
 through his thigh, and he is a load for an 
 ambulance. He stops thinking then. Simply, 
 Babel reigns, and, so far as he is concerned, 
 somebody else can go into the particulars of 
 it all. 
 
 Somebody else does that. The rifle-fire 
 resembles the noise of heavy rain falling, and 
 counting in the racket made by the guns, 
 " It was like a thousand World's Fairs, and 
 a thousand earthquakes, stuck in the Agri- 
 cultural Hall." A piece of shell is dancing 
 about as if it were a cricket ball gone out of 
 bounds, but drops its capers while it is still 
 innocent of human blood. There are little 
 83
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 tufts of dust all over the plain, and as these 
 rise there is always a whistling " phut " to 
 denote, also, just where the bullets are 
 striking. They make a devil's dance on the 
 hard ground. 
 
 The bullets of a lively fight write wondrous 
 tales, tragedies, and romances. They twice 
 fling sand in a soldier's face as he crouches 
 low, firing, and then his boot and foot come 
 to harm. " If ever I prayed in my life," he 
 tells us, "it was then ;" and you do not doubt 
 him. There is the same note in the jotting 
 of a Grenadier, " With a silent prayer to 
 Heaven, and a thought of all at home, I 
 dashed across the bullet-swept zone." That 
 is his response to the order, " Now, my boys, 
 all together as hard as you can go ! " A 
 Highlander, struck down in such a hazard, 
 sings a hymn while his life is ebbing, and a 
 Highland colour-sergeant welcomes death 
 with the words, " If any man is prepared to 
 die I am." Touching and worthy are these 
 last scenes ; they consecrate a bloody field. 
 
 A fine legacy for death has this Magers- 
 fontein, and to the soldier man death with 
 84
 
 The Combat Deepens 
 
 the sting, " For what purpose ? " " Fancy 
 us all," exclaims a Highlander, " when, 
 suddenly, without warning, there broke out 
 a terrific volley of fire. It was awful ! Men 
 were falling in heaps ! We lay down, as by 
 one common impulse, the bullets whizzing 
 over our heads." Amid what follows, our 
 chronicler is as a piece of driftwood which 
 a swelling river has plucked from its banks. 
 
 His rifle is grasped by some unknown 
 hand ; perhaps the hand of death itself. 
 Anyhow, he who has clutched it stumbles, 
 others tumble above him, and the rifle dis- 
 appears under a very cairn of bodies. It is 
 a cairn of remembrance, but not the cairn 
 the ancient Highlanders built when they 
 went forth to fight. Each brought a stone, 
 and when the war was over each survivor 
 returned for one. Thus the cairn of remem- 
 brance stood for the roll of the departed ; 
 but here, veritably, lie the warm slain to 
 be counted. 
 
 Blood runs wet on a rifle that is gathered 
 from a rock, to replace the lost one. A 
 piper has struck up " The Campbells are 
 85
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 Coming," a tune which stoutens hearts and 
 moistens eyes. Shadow and darkness and 
 doubt vanish. It had been " My God, I 
 shall never forget it all my life, Bill ! 
 Terrible, fearful ; surprised, shot down like 
 dogs ! " But, for the moment, it is forgotten 
 in the wild, cheering Highland note of the 
 bagpipes — forgotten, save to avenge. Home 
 with the cartridges, into the firing line, and 
 forward to a day's fusillade under the 
 blistering sun. 
 
 It is the high stress of war, a situation 
 which demands the two warrior qualities, 
 moral courage and physical courage. Thirst 
 passes into torture, exhaustion into faintness ; 
 and the sun roasts one side of the person, 
 while the sand bakes the other. 
 
 " There we lay in the sun all day, and 
 it took the skin off my legs ; once I tried to 
 pull my hose up, but this slight movement 
 attracted such a rain of bullets that I gave 
 It up. 
 
 The thin line of fire creeps forward, ever 
 nearing the lead-dealing heights, ever getting 
 thinner. With a hop, step, and a jump, a 
 36
 
 The Combat Deepens 
 
 nimble pastime of the remote Highland 
 Gathering, the soldier advances by knolls of 
 shelter. The sure foot slips, but not because 
 it is at fault ; a bullet has intervened, and a 
 wounded man is crawling back to his knoll. 
 Is the shot fatal ^ Then there may be a cry, 
 a stutter of speech to the winds, a groan, or 
 nothing. War is working vehemently, but 
 it cannot go on thus for ever, since, after all, 
 it is not machinery. Brain and muscle are 
 behind the machinery, giving it life, and they 
 must rest. 
 
 The flash of a lantern in the dark holds 
 shadows as well as light ; but aye it is the 
 light that triumphs. " Never shall I forget," 
 a Borderer says of shadow and light at 
 Colenso, " our thrills of combined delight 
 and fear, at the thought of rushing into what 
 seemed a veritable death-trap." Beside him 
 is the man who chooses to be the last to turn 
 from a forlorn hope. He is armoured in 
 devil-me-careness and he retires at a slow 
 stride. He halts, kindles his pipe, blows out 
 the match and stamps upon it lest it should 
 set fire to the grass. Yes, indeed ! Smoking 
 87
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 furiously, he continues his stroll, and raps 
 out a curse in return for the admiring word. 
 It is his awkward thanks. 
 
 Kindred in strain is he who notes of an 
 adventure, " Even if I had been certain to be 
 hit, I think I should have had that drink." 
 He has gasped sorely for a drop of water, 
 and sight of the Tugela fairly makes his 
 tongue ache. He tries to count the bullets 
 pattering in the water but cannot, they are so 
 many. Still, "I chanced it at the finish, 
 went and scooped a helmetful, and I'm 
 hanged if a Boer could hit me." Nor, being 
 a stout fellow, is he a poor target either ; 
 which circumstance, on this occasion, blows 
 up his satisfaction. 
 
 But he has hardly crowed to himself when 
 he is enveloped by a flash and a crash, and 
 his next memory is the voice of the colour- 
 sergeant asking, " Are you all right now ? " 
 He awakens to find himself lying behind a 
 stone, with his coat undone, and he inquires, 
 " How long have I been here ? " He 
 fancies hours, but is assured "Only a few 
 minutes," yet long enough, the trouble being
 
 The Combat Deepens 
 
 no greater than this — " It appears the smoke 
 and dust from that last shell went down the 
 wrong way." He has a vile taste in his 
 mouth. 
 
 For that reason, perhaps, none of the 
 higher emotions of battle worry him. He 
 is content to set the incidents of a day 
 against one another, and accept them weight 
 for weight. More acute is the case of an 
 artillery sergeant, since it is the pitch-and- 
 toss of death or being made prisoner. He 
 imagines that the former fate may fall to 
 him, and " every little thing in my life," 
 runs through his mind; but merely he 
 is made prisoner. That plight kills auto- 
 biography, as a Berkshire, at variance with 
 some other witnesses, holds the heat of battle 
 to still the wagging tongue. 
 
 " I suppose," his affidavit runs, " it's 
 plenty talk and no do at home about our 
 fight. Here it was just the opposite ; it 
 was all do and no talk. In fact, I never 
 heard a man speak for over ten hours — there 
 was no chance. We had enough to do to 
 look after our heads, without talking." 
 89
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 While doing this, a corporal, roused in the 
 dim dawn to a scrimmage, encounters a 
 violent end. He loses his helmet, picks up 
 a Boer hat to replace it, is mistaken for one 
 of the enemy and killed. What may not 
 happen when, from the welter of battle, there 
 springs that gleaming fury, the bayonet 
 charge ? Watch it, steel-tipped, going up 
 the heights of Glencoe, where the dying 
 general cries, " Tell me, do tell me, have 
 they taken the hill yet ? " 
 
 " When the order came to take it," says 
 a soldier, turned historian, " we went up like 
 rockets. I was with some more chaps right 
 in front, and the fashion in which we got 
 over boulders, and took flying leaps across 
 hedges, was a fair treat. I don't know how 
 I did it now, but it didn't seem two minutes 
 from the start when I was right at the top of 
 the hill, stabbing for all I was worth. I was 
 so excited that I got away from our main 
 body, and my ankle twisting over a big stone, 
 down I came a cropper." 
 
 What are the thoughts, feelings, impulses, 
 that send the soldier into an instant cheer, 
 90
 
 The Combat Deepens 
 
 when he is bidden to charge the enemy ? 
 The question interests a Grenadier with a 
 taste for abstract reasoning. Is it an instinct 
 with all fighting men to shout themselves 
 into the charge — the tally-ho of the hunting 
 field, the cry of an animal in pursuit of 
 another ? Is it self-cheering, knitting lines 
 of men together by a thrill, or is it a blast to 
 disconcert the enemy ? This is what the 
 Grenadier thinks — 
 
 " I suppose you wonder why we 
 cheered ? Well, it's more to frighten the 
 enemy than anything else. They don't like 
 a British cheer ; it seems to go straight 
 through them." 
 
 Elsewhere there is the statement that it 
 feels " rather funny " to run with the bayonet 
 at a man who has been shooting straight. 
 The sensation is peculiar, as the exercise is 
 dangerous. How is the mind occupied at 
 such a moment ? You would never guess 
 one answer. " All I could think of was 
 whether I should get at an enemy, and where 
 I should stick my bayonet into him, and how 
 far .^ " It is a grim concentration of purpose, 
 91
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 but for that take the story of a Scot who 
 has cornered his man and is about to make 
 prize of him. Another Scot intrudes, in a 
 brotherly way, whereupon the first turns on 
 him with, " Tam, gang an' get a Boor for 
 yersel'." 
 
 This story might adorn the record ot a 
 valiant scribe who bubbles over with, " Oh, 
 wasn't it lovely ! Oh my ! didn't I make 
 my bayonet red ! It was the best fun I ever 
 had ; I made one or two of them cough, I 
 bet ; they won't cough again in a hurry." 
 A trim fellow this, for the camp fire of an 
 evening, when he who can yarn best is hero. 
 Not always. A group of yeomen, just out 
 from England, are narrating to another 
 group of regulars the hardships attending 
 the defence and relief of Ladysmith. One 
 of the regulars reports, with great glee, this 
 sequel — 
 
 '' After they had told us all about the 
 terrible struggle the British had to get to 
 Ladysmith, one of our fellows quietly said 
 that we had taken part in the battles of 
 Colenso, Spion Kop, and Pieters Hill. You 
 92
 
 The Combat Deepens 
 
 could have knocked them down with a 
 feather." 
 
 War has other colours besides red. It can 
 be brute and angel in the same minute. It 
 slays, and with scalding tears bends over the 
 corpse. " If you have killed one antagonist," 
 we happen upon the sentence, " you feel as if 
 you would like to keep on killing." Such 
 is the voice of the tempest. With the calm 
 there rises the sweet call of mercy, as, " I pray 
 to God the war may soon be over. The 
 scene was awful to behold. Red, red, red 
 was the colour ! " Soul and body strain to 
 bursting in the tussle of war, and there, no 
 doubt, lies its consuming power over the 
 natural man, when he is in its midst. It is 
 the supreme sensation of spirit and flesh, for 
 the former has hardly vanquished the latter, 
 as we have seen, when the scale again 
 turns — 
 
 '* Our men fixed bayonets, up came the 
 Gordons, and with one British cheer they 
 
 went at 'em like h . Nothing between 
 
 us and the enemy but distance, and all rushed 
 it as if we were mad." 
 93
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 South Africa does not yield us the rattle 
 of a great cavalry charge, events there not 
 being so ordered. But of horsemen flying 
 after horsemen we have endless visions, 
 mostly with room between them ; once or 
 twice, as at Elandslaagte, with less than a 
 lance length. " Nothing can hold our men 
 in," writes a trooper, of one of those close- 
 driven and not very familiar scenes. " You 
 see lance and sword flash, and hear the thud 
 of the slashes right and left, but you don't 
 know you are fighting. You know nothing 
 till you hear the ' rally ' sounded, and you 
 pull up to find that you are merely a 
 common soldier." Rough-riding, in a saddle 
 of scarlet, is a nightmare memory, for a 
 comrade stands up in his sleep and raves of 
 its scenes. 
 
 Another trooper has a two-mile ride, with 
 a plunging cannon fire for accompaniment, 
 and on his lips Tennyson's line, " All in the 
 valley of death rode the six hundred ! " 
 " Draw swords ; come on ; men of the 
 Inniskillings, charge!" — that is an order 
 repeated to us. " We were like a lot of mad 
 94
 
 The Combat Deepens 
 
 men," the writer declares ; " we went like 
 lightning into them." Consider a charge, 
 driven home by horse, and what an intoxi- 
 cation it must hold. It is the prince of 
 animals blowing as a bellows on the human 
 fires of his rider. There is life, assuredly, 
 in being swung along by a horse ; a swift 
 singing of the blood. Set that horse aglow 
 with the spur of war, and who shall number 
 the emotions of the rider ^ The senses go 
 drunk with battle. 
 
 But, meanwhile, the long fight, at long 
 reaches, has been writing the doomsday 
 book — the combat also deepens with the big 
 guns. " Enough to turn your hair grey," 
 a bombardier says of a cannon duel, so let 
 us go into action with a battery which 
 finds itself where death and glory are the 
 counters. 
 
 " Halt ! " " Action front ! " The orders 
 are nicely precise, and are acted upon with 
 precision. It is ping ! ping ! ping ! The 
 shells lisp in numbers which have only two 
 meanings, a miss or a hit. A driver is shot 
 and a horse falls, tripping up two others ; 
 95
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 but they are got to their feet again and into 
 a donga. Meanwhile the battery is blazing 
 shrewdly at yonder smoke, and the ground 
 groans and complains. It is steady conflict, 
 ding-dong, load and shoot, and load once 
 more. The opposing guns are beneath the 
 elbow of the hill, as nearly as can be told by 
 the smoke puffs. A shell sails through the 
 air, searching hither and thither, uncertain, 
 apparently by its cries, where it ought to 
 alight. It pitches beside three gunners and 
 leaves two, a gory sum in arithmetic. 
 
 The great guns are automatons which, by 
 contrast, show in relief the eager, sweating 
 gunners. There is touching record of two 
 men who find themselves the only survivors 
 of a gun's company at Colenso. Mauser 
 bullets have harvested their comrades, yet 
 they work on until there is no more ammu- 
 nition left. Having fired the emergency 
 rounds of case, they stand to the " 'tention " 
 and fall. It is their version of " Abandon 
 be ! We never abandon guns ! " 
 
 How heroism gilds the horrors of that 
 affair, and how quietly Atkins conveys this 
 96
 
 The Combat Deepens 
 
 heroism to our understanding ! " Now my 
 lads, it is your last chance to save the guns ; 
 who will volunteer ? " They are stunned 
 with the inferno which they have been 
 through, and need a minute to grasp the 
 appeal. " Then the corporal got up," we 
 have the rest, " and when we saw him we 
 volunteered at once to fetch them." Simple 
 faith, you see, and Norman blood ; and the 
 teaching that adversity is the mint of 
 supreme heroism. 
 
 " It's a bit warm up there," a pert rifle- 
 man interjects, in the same spirit of brisk 
 fortitude ; " they have hit me three times, 
 but haven't rung the bell yet." He is the 
 fellow to march with when the troops are 
 heavily engaged ; and his spirit is ram.pant. 
 Some men are lighting their pipes, others 
 joke at a bullet striking unduly near ; and a 
 new-comer pushes quickly into the firing line 
 because, he declares, " I won't get shot till 
 I've had a pop at one or two of them." 
 
 Swish ! swish ! The Mausers snap in the 
 grass, and the Lee-Metfords crack back ; 
 tumultuous combat is everywhere ; it makes 
 97 H
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 heroes, and mayHap lunatics, being a wild 
 shake-up of man and universe. 
 
 Onward it roils, its sounds an orchestra to 
 the world, and none can name all the music. 
 
 98
 
 VI.— HIT ! 
 
 Dirges the bullets play on the strings of life they have broken; 
 a battle-field chorus crying to the night of the long silence. 
 
 IT may be possible to look at a battle 
 without seeing it, to lie under its fire 
 and care not, to be unthrilled by its maddest 
 hour. But to be hit .^ That is a direct, 
 clamorous challenge to the individual, an 
 affair all his, his only, and so he must speak 
 or be for ever silent. 
 
 " When a Tommy gets wounded," writes 
 a Middlesex drummer, " he is a regular Die 
 Hard. He simply says ' I've got it,' and in 
 such a calm manner too." 
 
 That is the mettle, but it expresses itself 
 
 in a hundred different ways. It is a question 
 
 of temperament, of the physical condition at 
 
 the moment, of religion and the higher things. 
 
 99
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 To be hit, going down before the laggard 
 report has overtaken the bullet it speeds, is 
 to taste of the incalculable, the uncanny. 
 
 The deeps of this world and the next 
 surge in the bald record of a fatality at 
 Ladysmith. Two soldiers are fighting side 
 by side, when suddenly one lurches heavily 
 into the arms of the other. " My poor 
 chum," says he, " gave a groan and cried 
 ' Mother,' and that word has been ringing 
 in my ears ever since. But he died like a 
 British soldier, and I hope he has gone to a 
 better world." 
 
 A Highlander, a good lad not long from 
 the fireside, is calling for his mother, as the 
 stretcher-bearers carry him away. A private 
 of the Queen's tells of a young comrade who 
 " rolled over into another chap's arms, said 
 ' Mother,' and died." Often the dear word 
 comes to the lips of the wounded. Poor 
 fellows drop with a sad, loving cry to 
 mother or wife. The theme is almost 
 sacred. 
 
 So is that suggested by a Northumberland 
 Fusilier who, wounded in limb, lies in a sheet 
 
 100
 
 Hit! 
 
 of fire. '* I offered up a prayer to God," he 
 says, " to look after you and the children." 
 But here the trifle comes in most absurdly, 
 and all is changed as at the waving of a wand. 
 A bullet tears the fusilier's trouser and his 
 angry resentment at this puts new life in 
 him. He struggles to his feet, hobbles 
 onward, and happily is not to be counted 
 within the meaning of a guardsman's report, 
 " It is strange that a majority of those in our 
 battalion, who have been killed or wounded, 
 are married. It seems hard for them." 
 
 An artillery driver, shot in the heart, 
 murmurs, " Oh, Johnny ! " and is dead before 
 his companion can turn round to him. A 
 shell rips a man open, leaving him scarce 
 time to say, " Help ! " the piteous cry of the 
 doomed. One Seaforth is counselling another 
 to rest quietly, and so master the pain of a 
 wound, when a bullet hits himself. " I'm 
 done for now," are his words. Those of an 
 officer, whose life is rushing from five 
 wounds, are " My God ! My God ! I'm 
 shot ! Lie down, men, lie down ! " His 
 thought is for them, when the shock of 
 
 lOI
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 his own numbering for death lets him 
 think. 
 
 An officer of Highlanders, equally con- 
 cerned for his men, who love him, is enjoin- 
 ing them to make the most of their scant 
 shelter. " He was just telling me to keep 
 my head out of sight, and when he got the 
 length of ' head ' he was shot. I was almost 
 crying when I saw him fall back. I gave 
 him my water-bottle, but he was about 
 gone." He passed with the goodbye, " I 
 am done for, boys." 
 
 A youngster, on the track of glory, is 
 struck by a bullet, but only on the cartridge 
 pouch. That being all, and being a youngster, 
 he yells grandly, but his face is a blush of 
 self-conscious shame a minute later. Another 
 lad bothers the corporal for his rifle with 
 which to have a shot at the enemy — bothers 
 and cajoles him to loan it for a minute. 
 Afterwards the boy is wounded in the right 
 lung, yet he keeps cheerful and smiling, a 
 way " serious cases " have. 
 
 The crown of gay endurance surely belongs 
 to the heroic naval lieutenant who has had his 
 
 102
 
 Hit. 
 
 legs amputated by a stray shell. " My cricket 
 is spoiled," he remarks to himself, lighting a 
 cigarette, at which he blows like a very Boreas, 
 all the road to the hospital. For him the 
 end is written, and he faces it with Spartan 
 courage, and the composure of a fine mind. 
 
 The near approach of death startles a soldier 
 at Stormberg, for a ghostly shadow may be 
 harder to meet than a reality. " I was sing- 
 ing and joking with my chum when a bullet 
 struck the top of my helmet. I stopped all 
 of a sudden, and even now they all chaff me 
 about it." Stops all of a sudden ! That is 
 exactly what he would do. A Coldstreamer, 
 whose ear a bullet splits, has the confession, 
 " I assure you I thought my time had come ! " 
 And how is it when it does come .? Again 
 the answer is as various as human nature. 
 
 A valiant fighter, employed in the trenches 
 on Spion Kop, has his arm blown off close to 
 the shoulder. He picks it up with the other 
 hand, saying " My arm, my arm ! Oh God, 
 where's my arm ? " Raging with pain, he 
 bounds out of the trenches, is instantly killed, 
 and thus saved more torture of mind and flesh, 
 103
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 A soldier, hurled from an armoured train 
 by a shell which also destroys his arm, runs, 
 shrieking, down the line, and can hardly be 
 gotten back. The " horrible and awfu' " 
 must reach its worst in the incident of a 
 wounded Highland sergeant, who madly plucks 
 off his kilt, and rushes towards the enemy. 
 Death stops him half way. This will be on 
 that fated day of valorous death about which 
 another Highlander has the report, " I believe 
 several of our fellows went off their heads and 
 walked right up to the enemy's lines, singing 
 till they were dropped." 
 
 Soldiers are hit and do not know it at 
 once, so engrossing may the fight be, so 
 accomplished its messengers. Of two privates, 
 resting in the ascent of Spion Kop, one is 
 munching an army biscuit, and the other is 
 flicking small pebbles at him. A particularly 
 sharp stone, as the man with the biscuit 
 fancies, strikes him on the neck. He leaps 
 round and demands indignantly, " Say, Bill, 
 did you chuck that stone at me ^ " Bill 
 denies the charge, and perceiving the occasion 
 for it rejoins, " Why, mate, you're wounded."
 
 Hit! 
 
 The bullet has caught him on the right side 
 of the neck, and gone into the shoulder. 
 
 " When we lay down," another instance is 
 on record, " I found to my surprise that I 
 was wounded." An East Surrey has no 
 notion he is hit until he proceeds to fire his 
 rifle, and then he discovers that he cannot 
 move his arm. A West Surrey is in the act 
 of firing, when something strikes him on the 
 head. He fancies, at the moment, that it is a 
 kick from a mule, but later finds the sear made 
 by a hot bullet. 
 
 By contrast, there is the affair of a stretcher 
 being ordered along to a man who thinks he 
 is hit, and is not. When he satisfies himself 
 that his skin is still whole, he rebufi^s the 
 stretcher with enormous energy. But some- 
 body else needs it. A bearer bends down to 
 give a drink of water to a Connaught who is 
 wounded in the thigh. His kindly deed is 
 anticipated by a rifle-bullet which goes through 
 the Connaught's brain. " I thought," the 
 bearer exclaims, " I should see no more of 
 my friends." Another exclamation for a 
 similar shock is, " My hair rose on end, and 
 105
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 I expected a finisher every moment." Men 
 express the same feeling quite differently. 
 
 How to define the stroke of a bullet .? 
 What does it feel like .? A Welsh bugler 
 speaks of a sting coming into his elbow, and 
 another soldier compares it to a sting in the 
 leg. " I believe I've stopped it," he says of 
 a bullet, and he is right, for his leg drips 
 blood. " I was about to charge with my 
 rifle," is the evidence of a Black Watch 
 private, " when I felt a stinging pain in my 
 leg, and after hobbling for a few yards I fell, 
 exhausted from loss of blood." A colour- 
 sergeant of the same regiment, while shoot- 
 ing from an ant-heap, is struck on the back 
 of the neck. He compares the shock to 
 that which a bar of iron might give, and 
 he goes numb for a few seconds. 
 
 The blow, as of a heavy assault, is also in 
 the testimony from Wagon Hill, " I felt as 
 if a man had come from behind and struck 
 me with a sixteen-pounder, and afterwards 
 put a red-hot needle into my shoulder." At 
 Graspan a sailor is seized with a pain in the 
 shoulder, as if a stout stick had struck it. 
 io6
 
 Hit! 
 
 He grows sick and faint, but is consumed 
 with curiosity until he has traced the course 
 of the bullet. At Belmont a marine has " a 
 funny sensation " steal into his arm, as if 
 somebody had given him " a blow on the 
 funny bone." His arm fails him, and when 
 he examines it there is a hole through the 
 fleshy part. 
 
 " It knocked me for six," is the statement 
 we have about a bullet in the knee ; " it 
 might have been those hammer things for 
 which you pay a penny, and try your 
 strength." A wound from a piece of shell 
 comes about thus : " All of a sudden I felt a 
 bang on my knee. I tried to advance, but 
 tottered and fell." This wound is ugly, 
 but that Is the hall-mark of shell in all its 
 activities. It is the thunderbolt of war, the 
 wrecker of nerve, when not the body- 
 breaker. 
 
 Its measure of efficiency in the latter sense 
 is shown in a tale from Spion Kop, related 
 by a Scottish Rifleman. A shell slides over 
 his back, cuts up his neighbour, and breaks 
 the arm and thigh of a second man. It 
 107
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 blows off the legs of a fourth soldier, and a 
 fifth is left with one leg hanging by the skin. 
 " They never murmured," we learn ; which 
 is the lamp of a tragedy too grim for words. 
 The blood of two races mixes in the African 
 mother-earth, she taking back to her embrace 
 the manhood of which war leaves men the 
 poorer. 
 
 " Thank God I don't feel as bad as I 
 look," is the cheery hail of an officer with 
 one side of his face almost gone. " I can't 
 drive, I can't ride, I can't fight any more," 
 cries a sentenced gunner, " but I can die like 
 a soldier for my Queen and country." He 
 stops there, a gleam flames in his eyes, as of 
 a winter sun dipping behind the hills ; he 
 shouts " Battery halt, action ! " and all is 
 finished. 
 
 The death of an artillery driver is strangely 
 similar, though, indeed, he has just complained 
 that it lags behind its welcome : " I can't drive 
 now, I can't fight, 1 can do nothing ; I can- 
 not even die." This he repeats, over and 
 over again, to each knot of sympathising 
 comrades, but even as he speaks the black- 
 io8
 
 Hit! 
 
 striped corporal of the guard arrives to relieve 
 him. " Form up number four company ! " 
 The raving soldier sings it out in a voice 
 which echoes the grave. His face turns grey 
 and rigid, the command is " March," and his 
 round of duty is over. 
 
 A young chief of Highlanders, who has 
 been in many a hot corner, is shot through 
 the heart, his most vulnerable part, because 
 it was open to mankind. " Oh, they have 
 done for me this time," is his dying word. 
 Instant death ! It is a gurgle, a murmur, a 
 mere recognition of what has happened, or a 
 startled cry of surprise. A corporal crawling 
 from one bush to another meets a death- 
 laden bullet, and groans faintly, " My God ! 
 God ! God ! " How painfully, how lovingly 
 such details are chronicled ; the fragments of 
 a soldier's shroud, for mother or wife or child 
 to treasure. 
 
 Two soldiers are in a ditch, under cover, 
 putting to each other the inquiry, "When is 
 that ammunition coming up, so we can get 
 another smack at them ^ " One turns his 
 head with a bullet in it, and dies in the 
 109
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 middle of the talk. This upsets the other 
 more than rows of stranger dead would, 
 being the difference between what is personal 
 and what Is general. He has seen his " chum" 
 slain, and that is to taste of the very bitter- 
 ness of death. Elsewhere " chums " — the 
 relationship is part and parcel of Atkins — 
 are firing from the same clump of shelter. 
 " Look at this," says one holding up his 
 bruised helmet ; '* I hope it does not get any 
 nearer than that." Before he can return his 
 helmet to his head he is a corpse to a surer 
 bullet. 
 
 With death searching the air, the mind 
 seeks comfort and courage in fond memories 
 and thoughts of happy hours in the future. 
 Several artillery drivers make a ring of talk, 
 and one laughs, " What a spree I'll have when 
 I get back ! " But instead he is the imme- 
 diate victim of a shell, and we see the same 
 radiant hope crushed in an incident vouched 
 for by a Coldstream. " My chum and I," 
 he records, " were talking of what a grand 
 time we would have when we got back to 
 London. Not many minutes afterwards we 
 no
 
 Hit ! 
 
 had the order to advance and he fell, shot in 
 sixteen places." The London of the Guards 
 was to know him no more. 
 
 At Paardeberg a man lies in such agony 
 that his saying on death is, "I prayed it 
 might be quick. Comrades were killed and 
 wounded by my side, and I could not get 
 away, but the Lord kept me alive through it 
 all." A marine, who " gets it hot " at 
 Graspan, is also in the plight to name death 
 as a welcome visitor. A rough tourniquet 
 dams enough blood back into his veins to keep 
 him alive, and he watches the bullets "making 
 spots " all round him. " I just lay still," he 
 writes, " wondering when they were going 
 to put one into me, and almost cursing them 
 because they didn't, for the sun was fearfully 
 hot, and I was gasping thirsty." 
 
 It is the body in despair, in collapse ; not 
 merely in pain, as when a "red-hot" bullet 
 lodges under the puttie of a soldier and burns 
 the flesh. The doctor certifies it too warm 
 to hold in the hand, and trudges to the next 
 patient, perhaps a philosopher in this style : 
 
 " Hit, by jove ! As we were advancing I 
 III
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 got a bullet through the leg, not bad — 
 through the fleshy part of calf. I was just 
 getting under cover, and suddenly went head 
 over heels ; am now lying in a ditch waiting 
 for stretcher-bearer." 
 
 Next, to a stoic. " Near shave that, sir } " 
 " Yes," he gets answer, and then, after a long 
 pause, the information, " That shot hit me in 
 the foot ; but never mind, I can stick it, so don't 
 say anything." He fights on. The near shaves 
 are constant, and Atkins sets down the fact 
 indifferently. His interpretation of a " near 
 shave " is a miss by a hair's breadth, or a hurt 
 which, by some providence, is not fatal. If 
 it is the former he assures us that " you 
 begin to feel queer " ; if it is the latter, 
 that "you feel pretty queer." The distinction 
 is excellent as between broken bones and 
 whole. 
 
 After a battle a soldier rummages his 
 waistcoat pocket for the short-stalked well- 
 coloured peace-pipe. His fingers close on a 
 bullet that has broken the pipe. He is 
 surprised out of his smoke. A man with a 
 splintered leg that refuses further duty, makes 
 
 112
 
 Hit! 
 
 it comfortable as he lies on the battlefield, 
 then lights a cigarette. One bullet hits his 
 haversack, a second grazes his heel, and many 
 bury themselves in the sand beside his head. 
 At Spion Kop a Scotsman finds himself 
 blazing on, with a stone-cold Lancashire 
 Fusilier at each elbow : 
 
 " The bullets struck anywhere but me, 
 until I fancied I was having it all my own 
 way. Then came a crash right over the top 
 of the trench into my hip, and splinters of 
 rock with it. I fancied my leg had gone, 
 for the blood poured like a tap, but the pain 
 soon stopped, and I had another pop at 
 them." 
 
 There is never enough of the *' other 
 pop," and one story in that relation is quite 
 odd. It presents us with a soldier who has 
 been wounded in the elbow before he can fire 
 a shot in the war. This worries him much ; 
 it is not in his thoughts to carry home a clean 
 rifle. So he asks his comrades to prop him 
 up, to level it at the enemy, and to make his 
 wounded arm pull the trigger. Then, and 
 only then, does he allow himself to be carted 
 113 I
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 oflF to the hospital, with its surgical problems, 
 complex as those of the Gordon Highlander 
 who has a broken wrist, a hole in the fore- 
 head, and a bullet in the " napper." 
 
 " I was out of action after that," he con- 
 fesses, " for all was dark. I heard the officer 
 say, ' Poor chap, he's gone.' But no, I am 
 still kicking." 
 
 Hardly less trying is the experience of a 
 trooper who gets down to fasten his horse's 
 bit. A bullet flies over its neck and enters 
 the rider's chest by the top buttonhole of his 
 tunic. " Had it been the least trifle either 
 way," he assures us, " it would have killed 
 me, but thanks be to God for His mercies, I 
 am getting on famously." A staunch heart 
 goes all the day ! 
 
 It enables an Irish soldier nobly to endure 
 suffering while he helps to carry his wounded 
 colonel from the field. "Who's hit.?" the 
 colonel demands of the men who are bearing 
 the stretcher, for there has just been a tell- 
 tale "slushy thud." " Begorra, sir, an' it's 
 me," is the answer ; "it's in the neck." " Put 
 me down," orders the colonel. " No, sir," 
 114
 
 Hit ! 
 
 is the man's frank indiscipline ; "I am able to 
 carry you to safety." He does that, and 
 then rolls into the hands of the doctors. 
 
 A brother Irishman occupies the wait until 
 his part in a battle shall arrive, by carolling 
 " Standing round a corner, watching people 
 fight ! " He is more than musical ; he is 
 confident that the affairs of his particular 
 task " will never upset me." But even so 
 a bullet overthrows him, and his gaiety is 
 eclipsed for the time being. 
 
 The airy note is frequent in these avenues 
 of strife and death. " I caused a little fun," 
 notes a Royal Lancaster, " by lighting my 
 pipe as soon as I was shot. He has a prece- 
 dent in the Gordon officer who, being crippled 
 in a charge, limps to a rock where he can 
 smoke and cheer his men. A picturesque 
 incident ! Heroism need not be drab to the 
 eye, though mostly it is. 
 
 A young trooper and a fragment of shell 
 have a meeting, and it is ill for him. But he 
 carefully collects his belongings and tracks 
 down the kopje to where the stretchers wait. 
 *' Hullo, old man," he salutes an acquaintance 
 "5
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 among the bearers, " they've shot away one 
 lung, but I've got a second left, and I'm not 
 going in this time ! " Nor does he, thanks 
 to a constitution as good as his resolution, 
 the double endowment v/ith which to meet 
 scowling fortune. 
 
 A soldier explodes sharply at another, 
 " Now what do you mean by sitting down 
 on the top of me ? " It is sad laughter, for 
 the reason turns out to be a straight-driven 
 bullet. However, we brighten up over the 
 experiences of the Irishman who proclaims 
 in a fine brogue, " Ah, and if the brutes 
 haven't hit me ! That's one back ter them." 
 Here a second bullet catches him, and he 
 delivers himself, "Bejabers, if they haven't 
 struck me the second toime." Yet once more 
 is he hit. " Well," he exclaims, his wonder 
 grown big, " that's number three. The black- 
 guards might leave a party alone after they've 
 hit him wance." He fires his pouch empty 
 to mark his sense of this unfairness, and by 
 that time his wounds have the mastery. 
 
 " I've got it. Pasha," says one rifleman, 
 in a low voice, to another. " Get one home 
 ii6
 
 Hit! 
 
 for me, and aim straight." That is Atkins 
 still on the trail of " getting his own back " ; 
 the Scriptural eye for an eye and a tooth for a 
 tooth. It is a trail on which a Wilts soldier 
 erects the sign-post, *' The more of your 
 chums you see knocked down, the madder 
 you seem to fight." 
 
 " It makes a man hard-hearted," a Berk- 
 shire joins in ; " all you think of then is 
 revenge." " Goodbye," a dying soldier 
 mutters ; " let 'em have some bullets and don't 
 forget that ' They can't beat the boys of the 
 bull-dog breed!'" Endless are the lights 
 when the veldt is lit. 
 
 Rake its fires again, and you drag forth 
 the pure gold of an officer's sacrifice : " No, 
 you stop here, and I'll carry that. You are 
 a married man." With this he relieves a 
 corporal of a despatch, the delivery of which 
 lies through a deadly cannonade. His words 
 are his own death-sentence, as they might 
 well be the epitaph on his grave. Equal 
 in chivalry is the act of a colonial whose 
 near-side trooper tumbles from the saddle 
 with the wail, " Oh, God ! won't somebody 
 117
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 help me ? " The colonial wheels about his 
 own horse, in the storm of lead, with the 
 answer, " Yes, old chap, I'll help you." 
 
 Long, long is the tale of being hit in 
 battle ; it is a Jacob's ladder linking earth 
 and heaven. " Never mind me, lads," is the 
 word of a doomed Lancaster captain to his 
 men : " trust in God as I have done." 
 
 *' 'Ere, matie, 'ave a look at my identifi- 
 cation card ; tell the wife I did my best to 
 get home to her, but " 
 
 That tale is complete. 
 
 ii8
 
 ^1 
 
 'i 

 
 VII.— CORNERS OF WAR 
 
 The individual amid the thunder of his surroundings^ 
 zvhich, while they occupy Ins full energies^ do not 
 obscure his soul. 
 
 TO the human plant war is as a hot- 
 house, wherein things ripen, or, if 
 they cannot bear the heat, are crumpled 
 up. This thought carries us into its Httle 
 personal corners, which show the individual, 
 like a silhouette, upon the screen of the 
 event. 
 
 Such prominence for the man is due when 
 his spiritual side is concerned, that element 
 being the superior of affairs however great. 
 " Death is hovering around us," says a 
 soldier ; " I never was rehgious, but this 
 business is changing me, and many thou- 
 sands more." If a fuller exposition of 
 119
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 his meaning be sought, it is to hand from 
 a Northampton : — 
 
 " War is the most sobering influence I 
 know. Not only does it keep men sober 
 in the sense of drink, but it sobers their 
 every day, by reflections and thoughts of 
 their possible fate. They listen more atten- 
 tively to the religious services, and you will 
 find scores who, in times of peace, may be 
 the worst blasphemers, now studying their 
 Bibles and turning towards God. There 
 is plenty of scoffing in barracks, but a 
 man who says his prayers has a respectful 
 and even reverent audience in his tent. 
 Sometimes I wish, for the sake of the 
 morals of our army, that we were always 
 at war. If it brings evils, it also brings 
 the blessing of impressing soldiers with 
 their duties to their God, as well as to 
 their Queen and country." 
 
 This note of religion is frequent, and one 
 fruit of it is faith, even faith drifting towards 
 a certain fatalism as to the perils of battle. 
 " We have only once to die," runs a letter, 
 '* and if I fall it will be as a British soldier, 
 
 120
 
 Corners of War 
 
 so you have nothing to fear," The spirit 
 of reliance on Providence is now and then 
 jostled by a w^orldly detail in a way which 
 almost provokes a smile. You have that 
 in the sentence from a Highlander's letter, 
 " God in His mercy has kept me through 
 it all, but I wonder how I am not grey- 
 haired ! " However, reverence is not con- 
 tained in a phrase, and to plain faith the 
 here and the hereafter must, in war, seem 
 very near. 
 
 A Coldstreamer says of a religious book 
 which a friend has sent him, " It has 
 become quite a star in the land for us." 
 Almost the first voice he hears in the 
 morning is, " What's the text for the 
 day ? " An Irish Roman Catholic asks his 
 relatives to get some masses said for him, 
 and an English Protestant tells us of an 
 hour in battle when " I prayed to God to 
 look after you and the children." 
 
 The feeling that surges in these depths 
 worships even in a music-hall song : " Good- 
 bye, Daddy," is sung and eyes are wet with 
 tears. " They didn't let it go," we are told 
 
 121
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 of the chorus, " as they would if they had 
 been in a London music-hall. They sang 
 it in a quiet, soulful way, which showed that 
 many of them felt deeply what they were 
 singing." Surely, for the concert is at 
 Ladysmith, where men in their isolation 
 have time to think. 
 
 And in the open country, on the limit- 
 less South African veldt, where nothing dis- 
 turbs man's communion with Nature, hearts 
 also beat to the enduring things. *' I often 
 think of dear old mother's words when I cut 
 the top off a loaf, or when I had thrown 
 bread on one side because it was stale." 
 The writer quotes her advice as, " Ah ! my 
 boy, you might come to want it one day." 
 So it has fallen out, and he mentions the 
 prophecy and the fulfilment because he loves 
 to talk of his mother. His fellows each 
 chime back, "Why, my dear old mother 
 has often said that to me ! " This also is 
 the love of men for their mothers — a fire 
 by which they bivouac, a star by which they 
 steer. 
 
 A non-commissioned officer wisely re- 
 
 122
 
 Corners of War 
 
 marks of Atkins that he grumbles at small 
 annoyances and laughs at great ones. He is 
 ruffled when a raindrop trickles through his 
 tent and steals coldly down the back of his 
 neck. But let him be blown out of that tent 
 by a hurricane, then drenched to the skin, 
 and he is the buoyant warrior, indifferent 
 to the elements. He frets at the single 
 drop of rain, just because it is a trifle, which 
 can have no purpose, and he rises on the 
 wings of the storm, saying, " Here's an 
 event of consequence." Perhaps human 
 life runs more on these extremes than on 
 the middle way of calculation, expressed 
 in the following extract : — 
 
 " After this campaign I hope to settle 
 down into a quiet, peaceful life, get my 
 medals made into brooches for some of my 
 family, and pack up my military things for 
 my descendants to unpack when they feel 
 disposed to work up some martial feeling." 
 
 Do not imagine that our philosopher is 
 
 really lacking in the martial quality ! It 
 
 is infectious when not inborn. A man 
 
 at Stormberg is so possessed of it that, 
 
 123
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 before jumping into a sheltering ravine, he 
 turns about, waves his helmet defiantly, and 
 shouts he knows not what. He does it all 
 at the risk of his life, for the bullets are zip, 
 zip, zipping — his version of their noise — 
 with dour regularity. The individual in 
 him is momentarily detached from the 
 ongoings of the fight. His eye catches 
 sight of a khaki-clad figure lying at the 
 bottom of the ravine, exactly on the spot 
 where he himself will alight. " I thought 
 it would be cruel to jump on him, so moved 
 higher up." And the bullets are zip, zip, 
 zipping in pursuit of the mere physical unit 
 of war as it stands on the edge of the ravine. 
 They know not the being of soul and 
 thoughtfulness who jumps clear of a 
 wounded comrade. 
 
 Wonderful is the warp and woof of a 
 battle ! A Grenadier loses his water-bottle 
 stopper in a fray, and is inconsolable till he 
 finds a stray cork with which to guard the 
 hole. One of the Black Watch is holding 
 a flask containing a few drops of water to 
 a comrade's caked lips when a bullet blows 
 124
 
 Corners of War 
 
 the flask into fragments. A kindly lancer 
 stays with another who is down so that the 
 latter may have company in a racking, 
 withering cross-fire. His agony, he tells 
 us, is not the pain of a wound, but the 
 fear of being hit again. We see the short 
 shrift which pain gets from the bearer of it, 
 in the action of a Welsh drill-sergeant, who 
 cuts off his boot, and with, a knife digs a 
 Mauser bullet out of his foot. " Proper 
 Welshman ! " 
 
 The quiet, incidental heroisms of the 
 battlefield, acts which come and go, un- 
 noticed and unrecorded, make a golden 
 book. Two Highlanders, brothers, are 
 lifting a third Highlander who is hurt, in 
 order to carry him to shelter. They start 
 on the errand but stop quickly, for a shot 
 has found a target, and a brother is brother- 
 less. Two friends who cling to each other 
 like brothers, though they are not, meet in 
 surprise and joy. " I thought you were 
 dead," says one. " No, not yet," says the 
 other as they shake hands. " Goodbye," 
 says the first, and they part " like ships that 
 pass in the night." 
 
 125
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 Then brothers come together in a dramatic 
 way. One has been in Ladysmith, while 
 another has been doggedly fighting to relieve 
 it. " Some one suddenly called out my 
 name, and I ran and found my elder 
 brother Thomas riding by with his bat- 
 tery." Do they embrace .? Do they weep 
 tears of affection } No ! " It's about 
 time," says the newcomer, " you had some- 
 thing to eat." 
 
 A boy bugler does vital service to the 
 wounded scattered over a hillside, helping 
 them to creep under cover, cheering them 
 up. But he comes to a man who is dead, 
 and the shock drives him back into boy- 
 hood. He cries, and is packed into a 
 jackal's burrow out of the battle. Nature 
 does not allow boys to be men for more 
 than a few hours ; only as a preparation. 
 Her cross-currents, however, are manifold. 
 
 They are suggested by the soldier who 
 writes, " Every fellow that gets shot is 
 saying, ' Thank God I'm finished with 
 the war ! ' and I don't blame them, for 
 it's horrible." It is the war-worn wail of 
 126
 
 Corners of War 
 
 the flesh, but up leap duty, citizenship, the 
 impulse to achieve, the determination to 
 win. Note how, in the instance of a 
 guardsman, these elements meet and settle 
 their differences. He is ill, but eager to be 
 in the fighting line. He is urged, almost 
 ordered, to fall out and go on the sick list ; 
 he turns a deaf ear even to the cajoling, 
 " You have a wife and children, and a 
 medal and a clasp to come, so give up." 
 He does not like the idea. He must see 
 the engagement through, and only after 
 that does he allow himself to be sick. His 
 combat with the keen enemy, disease, wins 
 no medal, but it is that of a prince of victory. 
 A Dublin Fusilier who plunges unex- 
 pectedly into a corner of rifle- fire has 
 thereupon two impulses. The first is to 
 turn and run, the other to reach the 
 enemy's trenches before anybody else. 
 This is at Colenso, where we find a touch 
 of superstition in the question that morning 
 of a private to his tent-mates, " Couldn't 
 they pick any other day than a Friday to 
 fight ? I'll bet a penny to a pound we 
 127
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 don't get near Colenso to-day." The 
 speaker who thus fears to speak of a 
 Friday is killed in the battle. 
 
 A man stands up in his sleep and mutters, 
 with pointed hand, " There will be a fight 
 there to-morrow, and some of us will catch 
 it." The fight occurs, and he is among the 
 slain. Of sixteen soldiers who talk one 
 evening of the yarns they will spin at home, 
 eight are being laid into the earth next 
 evening. It has been a severe struggle, like 
 Elandslaagte, where a wounded piper of the 
 Gordons sits on a rock, nursing, not himself, 
 but his beloved pipes. They are a new set, 
 only arrived from Scotland, and now the 
 windbag is bullet-riven. It will blow no 
 more music, and that is the ache which fills 
 our piper. Otherwise he is a match for the 
 ups and downs of war, and its unfathomable 
 mysteries, its curious incidents. 
 
 "By George!" exclaims a rifleman, "we 
 did have a hot time of it. How I got out I 
 don't know ; my luck must have been in 
 that day." Atkins believes in his luck ; it 
 is one of the pegs of his philosophy. A 
 128
 
 Corners of War 
 
 Lancaster, after twice avoiding death by a 
 hair's breadth, salutes himself as the 
 *' luckiest man on earth." A comrade 
 boasts of equal luck, and a few minutes later 
 treads upon a poisonous snake. "Hard, 
 wasn't it .'^ " he asks, "to be nearly destroyed 
 by that brute after surviving the battle ? " 
 
 A Northumbrian, whose watch has stopped 
 a bullet, congratulates himself, though only 
 in a degree, for, you see, he has suffered 
 damage to property, and a time-keeping 
 watch is a boon to a tent's company, the 
 owner of it a man of importance. A half- 
 crown piece will turn a spent bullet, and 
 does it in some cases without being spoiled as 
 legal tender. But from an outpost engage- 
 ment we have the lament, " The Queen's 
 shilling in my pocket was driven through my 
 thigh by the bullet." And Atkins sails 
 gaily into verse about the affair, so bringing 
 to our attention his lyrical gifts, which form 
 another small corner in war: 
 
 " We thought our Bobs at least was good, 
 But every hope it robs, 
 To think that Bobs's Tommies should 
 Be treated thus by ' bobs.' " 
 
 129 K
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 "Some poor devils," a west-country soldier 
 remarks quite unpoetically, " can't get within 
 a foot of a bullet but they kop it, whilst 
 many have missed me by inches." He adds 
 that four men have been shot dead in 
 positions that he has occupied a few minutes 
 earlier. " Such is luck, and I can do with 
 plenty of it ; " and there he leaves the 
 matter. It is carried forward by a writer 
 whose view is, " Somehow I don't think 
 anything will happen to me ; I'm sure I was 
 not made to be shot, not after my escape in 
 that first battle." Perhaps it has been as 
 narrow as that of the man who is tied up in 
 a wire fence, in the middle of the fire-zone, 
 until a bullet snaps the wire and sets him 
 free. 
 
 That is an episode, while a sergeant of the 
 Scottish Borderers gives us an odd coinci- 
 dence. A home friend sends him good 
 luck in the jocular remark, "If you fail to 
 find a bullet, don't stop one for me." On 
 the date which this letter bears, the sergeant 
 is wounded. He marvels somewhat, but a 
 Connaught Ranger is altogether serious 
 130
 
 Corners of War 
 
 about presentiment, holding it to be actual 
 second sight. At Pieters Hill, nearing the 
 end of the rough road to Ladysmith, his 
 closest friend is shot in the heart. " Give 
 
 my love to my wife and chil Ah — h !" 
 
 and death chokes the tender message. 
 " Often," the more fortunate Connaught 
 continues, " I have heard fellows say, ' I 
 know I'm going to kop out,' and sure 
 enough they have." He has never had 
 these forebodings himself, and he survives to 
 wonder " Does something warn us.^ " 
 
 However that be, can a spirit of dread, a 
 dark vision of the future, be more awesome 
 than the spirit of the immediate dead 
 encountered without warning ? It is an 
 Irishman, all thirst after Colenso, crawling to 
 the Tugela to assuage it, who suggests this. 
 Let him tell how: 
 
 " I was lowering my bottle into the river, 
 when I started back aghast. What did I see ? 
 From the bottom there stared up at me 
 the dead face of my comrade. We were 
 boys together, and joined the regiment 
 together ; early in the battle we were 
 131
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 fighting side by side, and now, after the 
 awful work, I met him once more." Truly, 
 a cold corner in death. 
 
 But there is laughter and relief in the 
 plight of two soldiers who, being engaged 
 in making a trench, differ as to their 
 respective shares in the labour. The argu- 
 ment drives them to the incaution of show- 
 ing themselves on the skyline. Presently, 
 with many a " flirt and flutter," along 
 skims a Boer shell. It settles the dispute 
 and perhaps points a moral. How often, in 
 history, has the personal fire invited the 
 flame of war.'' Not once nor twice only. 
 
 But Atkins does not let abstract questions 
 come between him and the by-play of the 
 fighting. There is the tale, classic in worth, 
 of the Zulu mule-driver who accidentally 
 drops his concertina in the path of an 
 oncoming crowd of cavalry. His concer- 
 tina is his heart's delight, and he turns 
 about in his perched seat and yells again 
 for its preservation. "Mind that concertina! 
 pass the word ! " thereupon cries the good- 
 natured leader of the horsemen, twisting past 
 132
 
 Corners of War 
 
 it himself. Signalling hands go up, and the 
 word is carried down that street in the veldt, 
 " Mind the concertina ; mind the wind- 
 jammer ! " The cavalcade picks cautiously 
 past it, in the rush for the next innings of 
 war, and the Zulu smiles his gratitude. 
 
 An infantry corps is under fire. A 
 member of it has a tin of biscuits which 
 keeps falling to the ground. But always 
 he stoops to recover it, as if it were a greater 
 stake than his own life. A Highland corps 
 is advancing : 
 
 " When we opened out, a hare ran along 
 our front and buried itself in an ant-heap. 
 An officer in our company shouted, ' Half 
 for me, Macdonald,' and I dashed out in 
 front and caught it. After carrying the 
 hare for ten hours I had to throw it away." 
 
 This is the small change of warfare. 
 Among its larger currency we find the hoary 
 saying, " Better be born lucky than rich ! " 
 So says a private who has gone through 
 many fights unhurt ; only there are tricks 
 towards that. One is to put your helmet 
 on a bush when you are in a tight corner 
 133
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 and crawl away, leaving it for a target to 
 the enemy. " I guess I'll find plenty of air- 
 holes in it when I go back," a man remarks 
 who has tried the ruse. He gloats over it 
 quietly, not with the exultation of him who 
 declares, " It makes me feel like a general 
 when I see in the papers about the good 
 shooting of our gun, and think that I'm 
 responsible for it." 
 
 But they all do " their bit well," and they 
 all repine when it comes to being out of 
 action while there is proper "modern warfare" 
 going on. Atkins rolls this phrase on 
 his lips. By it a veteran who was at 
 Omdurman, describes the South African 
 campaign, in contrast to that of the Soudan. 
 He speaks with medals to back up his 
 authority. To the soldier the medal ever 
 gleams ahead, partly for itself, but chiefly 
 because it will be a sign and token to the 
 folks at home. " Tell father that he isn't 
 the only one who will have a medal. Wait 
 till he sees me." 
 
 Or, we have the confidence, " I thought I 
 wasn't to get the chance of winning a medal 
 134
 
 Corners of War 
 
 at all," followed by the expression of happy 
 relief, " But now I sha'n't have to return 
 without something to show you all." He is 
 filled with a real joy of the medal ; he sees 
 it hanging by the fireside, his eloquent 
 historian for all time to his blood relations. 
 " Dear mother," we read of a soldier with 
 four medals, " I think you ought to be 
 proud of your son." Another son promises 
 to return with a couple of medals, and he 
 does not know how many bars. A blue- 
 jacket, whom a wound puts out of the war, 
 is disturbed because " I shall not get any 
 more bars, and I wanted to beat you, 
 father." 
 
 A warrior who gaily adds bars to his 
 medal, is troubled lest he may eventually 
 have to hire a Kaffir to carry the load. 
 *' That's very well," some voice breaks in, 
 " but I'm a long way from home." "Don't 
 want medals," is a deliverance by itself ; " I 
 want to get home." No wonder, after a 
 long day of the sweat of war, but always 
 the South African morning dawns fresh and 
 hopeful. " Good hearts, but rather sore 
 ^35
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 feet," is the summary that we have from a 
 London soldier. " We are going to a place 
 called Spion Kop, and I don't think it will 
 be much of a ' kop ' for our chaps. But 
 never mind. Roll on ; I suppose v/hen we 
 are done we shall get a medal, or a ticket for 
 St. George's Workhouse." His is a mixed 
 outlook. 
 
 The fame of a regiment is deeply dear to 
 its members, and race and nationality assert 
 themselves with a glow under the folds of 
 the common flag. " I wonder," a guards- 
 man asks, " if anybody still fancies that the 
 Guards are only to be looked at .f* " 
 " Forward, Gordons," cries their colonel 
 at Elandslaagte, " the world is looking at 
 you ! " " Fix bayonets, men, and let's 
 make a name for ourselves," shouts a 
 colour-sergeant of Dublins, who has grown 
 tired of being shot at. One Irish corps 
 has a gentle quarrel with another, " We 
 were really first at the top of the hill, not 
 you, as has been stated. But it doesn't 
 matter, anyhow," is the conclusion, " for 
 we are all Irish." 
 
 136
 
 Corners of War 
 
 Celtic, too, is the story of a regiment 
 tired and travel-stained, which hears the 
 bagpipes after four months' silence. " You 
 should have seen the men throw out their 
 chests, and put their heads back when the 
 pipes began. You would have thought we 
 were going off guard instead of finishing 
 up a march of a hundred miles." What 
 becomes a soldier better than esprit de 
 corps? and isn't pride of blood a spur to 
 valour ^ 
 
 Being of London, which is a blend of the 
 whole nation, the C.I.V.'s are a corner by 
 themselves. One of them hears from a 
 prisoner that the enemy have a mortal terror 
 of the C.I.V.'s " because nothing has gone 
 right with them since we came out." He 
 passes on the news well pleased, and indeed 
 under it is the spirit which achieves. 
 
 It is with a C.I.V. that the inimitable 
 Atkins has an inimitable talk ; a C.I.V. in 
 whom the airs and graces of the West End 
 linger, merely, however, hiding the gold 
 beneath. We owe the story, as England 
 owes so much, to that goodly company, 
 137
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 Atkins's friends, the war correspondents. 
 They are the commentators on his rawer 
 epistles, filling up, for those who care to 
 understand, what he leaves you to guess at ; 
 and that is the sense in which the tale is 
 quoted, with all acknowledgment : — 
 
 " 'E comes up to me," the regular reports, 
 " an' 'e sez to me, sez 'e, ' Look 'ere, me 
 man, where can I find your sergeant-major ? ' 
 
 " I looks at 'im an' I sez, ' What are 
 you ? ' sez I, 
 
 " 'E sez, ' I'm a City Imperial Volunteer,' 
 sez 'e. 
 
 " ' Oh ! ' sez I. 
 
 " ' Yus,' sez he. 
 
 " ' Yus,' sez I ; ' you're a volunteer an' 
 I'm a reg'ler,' I sez, ' an' you ain't goin' to 
 lord it over me,' 1 sez, ' with yer " me 
 man." Don't forget it,' sez I. ' I didn't 
 get no freedom of the City,' I sez ; ' the 
 only thing the Lord Mayor ever giv' me,' 
 says I, ' was fourteen days for fur'ous 
 drivin',' I sez. ' I wasn't entertained to tea,' 
 sez I, ' by all the dooks an' earls of London,' 
 I sez. ' I wasn't 'ugged an' kissed,' I sez ; 
 138
 
 Corners of War 
 
 ' but I'm a bloomin' previt, an' so are you, 
 me lad.' 
 
 " ' Yus,' sez he, ' an' damn proud of it,' 
 sez 'e. 
 
 " ' So am I,' sez I. 
 
 " ' Well, come an' 'ave a drink,' sez 'e. 
 
 " ' Right you are,' sez I ; ' now you're 
 talkin'.' " 
 
 139
 
 VIII.— THE ROLL CALL 
 
 Tke-^ throw in Dtumme?- Hodge, to rest 
 
 Uncoffined — -just as found : 
 His landmar\ is a kopje-crest. 
 
 That breaks the veldt around. 
 
 Thomas Hardy. 
 
 The daj's high work is over and done. 
 And these no more will need the sun : 
 Blow, you bugles of England, blow I 
 
 W. E. Henley. 
 
 THE great throws of life may so occupy 
 man's faculties in detail, as to cramp 
 them in a general sense. He sees in suc- 
 cessive patches, as from the window of a 
 railway train, being, like it, under full steam. 
 If it is a throw in a nation's life, this is also 
 true, for what blows the human fire into 
 such a roar .? 
 
 Therefore, a soldier may miss any large 
 140
 
 ■S"^ 
 
 
 
 si
 
 The Roll Call 
 
 vision of a battle, until its legacy smites him 
 and brings perspective. For hours he has 
 been reeking v^^ith dire combat ; slaying and 
 taking the chance of it, cursing and praying 
 and hungry. But war has been merely so 
 many events, until the roll is called. It is 
 the parade of the living and the dead ; the 
 dark lantern on what has been. Its flash 
 has surprise, agony, realisation, a whole surge 
 of emotions. 
 
 The mind's eye sees rows of dead men in 
 uniform, and now realises that they are dead, 
 for they answer not to their names. It sees 
 the fated enemy also dotting the ground, and 
 he has no uniform. There must be some- 
 thing thrice repulsive in death un-uniformed, 
 littering the battlefield. It is startling, a 
 shock, as if there had been a mighty accident. 
 Death seems to have no right on the battle- 
 field accoutred in frieze or broadcloth. 
 Yet it smites indifferently. 
 
 " I think the worst job of the whole lot," 
 writes a Northumbrian, " is to hear the roll 
 called. Name after name is read out and 
 many do not answer,'' 
 141
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 That simple, intimate touch, opens out 
 the highway of battle, all braided with 
 horrors, night or morn. " Blood and 
 bandages, groans and prayers," we hear it 
 weeping ; " people talk of the glories of 
 war. If they could only spend an hour on 
 a battlefield, immediately after the fight, they 
 would see little glory. It is hellish." The 
 expression, "fair fed up with it," is un- 
 expected in this relationship, but it is 
 realistic. Equally so is the coronach for the 
 dead of Wagon Hill : 
 
 *' My God ! it has been a terror. The 
 stench of human blood seems to be in my 
 nostrils yet." 
 
 *' I'm sick and tired of seeing so much 
 blood," says a gunner, about the hard fight- 
 ing in Natal. Of it, also, we have the lurid 
 picture, " When we got into their trenches 
 we were over the boots in blood." You 
 pass quickly from that, only to stumble 
 upon a Northampton who fairly shivers at 
 presence of the fell relics of battle. A 
 guardsman has the same feeling, but declares 
 that after a time one gets used even to such 
 142
 
 The Roll Call 
 
 scenes. Still, some, a Seaforth Highlander 
 interjects, can in no wise " stand the sight of 
 blood and the horrors of war," and theirs is 
 the sharpest torture. If such onlookers are 
 themselves hurt, then ache of body accom- 
 panies the pain of the sensitive temperament. 
 
 A young warrior, who has lain on the 
 field all the night after Elandslaagte, offers 
 us an eerie account of the experience. A 
 surgeon has put a field - dressing on his 
 wound, given him a taste of brandy, and 
 wrapped him in the blanket of a dead Boer. 
 Nothing more is possible that night. The 
 wound is agony, for two sharp stones are 
 catching the patient in the back, and his 
 mouth burns with thirst. A torrent of cold 
 rain does not allay this thirst, because he is 
 unable to catch the falling drops. They 
 merely soak him as he gazes longingly in 
 search of the dawn, and asks himself, " Will 
 it ever come ? " 
 
 As neighbours, he has a Highlander raving 
 
 in delirium, and a Boer in the rack of a 
 
 shattered leg. " War is a funny game, 
 
 mother," he soliloquises, " and nobody can 
 
 H3
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 realise all its barbarous reality." At day- 
 break our heroic sufferer is lifted into a 
 doolie by a doctor, and a gang of natives 
 carry him down the hill. " The ground was 
 awfully rough, and they dropped me twice. 
 I fainted both times." The wonder is that 
 he emerges from his suff'ering with any gift 
 of composure left. 
 
 " Shortly after the engagement," we get 
 another glimpse of the Elandslaagte field, 
 " it turned dark and it was horrible to see, 
 or rather to feel, all around us the dead, the 
 dying, and the wounded. We did what we 
 could for the injured, and then lay on the 
 hill all night, but we could get no sleep for 
 the cold and the rain and the moaning." 
 
 The battlefield is not struck dumb when 
 the fighting ceases ; on the contrary, the 
 half-life which it then has is its sorriest scar. 
 "It is dreadful, after dark, when the light- 
 ning is playing over the faces of the wounded 
 as well as the dead." And some clear, 
 personal tragedy may force itself under the 
 eyes of those who would like to shut them. 
 No need to search for one. 
 144
 
 The Roll Call 
 
 " Isn't it horrible? " a horse-soldier remarks 
 to a foot-soldier on the slope of Spion Kop ; 
 " it is more like a slaughter house." The 
 word is scarcely uttered, when a shell falls 
 plump beside the speaker, and he is a head- 
 less trunk, gnarled, and twisted out of all 
 human shape. That sight alone, keeps Spion 
 Kop red for the foot-soldier during the rest 
 of his natural life. Give us horrors in the 
 bulk and we may forget them, but make a 
 tragedy ours in particular, and the dye is 
 fast in our soul. 
 
 " Slaughtermans Hill!" A Dorset thus 
 upbraids Spion Kop, and a Middlesex likens 
 it to a butcher's shop. A Scottish Rifleman 
 says of his corner, " I was lying across two 
 dead men all the afternoon until we retired." 
 A soldier who has been in like company 
 reads of himself, in the casualty list, as being 
 dead. He is not much surprised. Indeed, 
 he might well be dead, for he had been hours 
 with death ; it is almost natural to read that 
 he has been killed at Spion Kop. Happily 
 he is only wounded. 
 
 That day a corporal of regulars, and a 
 
 145 L
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 private of a colonial corps, are " doing good 
 work," side by side, when a bullet kills the 
 former. The latter lays out the body, and 
 turns to the " good work " with the threat, 
 *' I'll have revenge." But his next word 
 is, " I've got it ; goodbye ! " and he also 
 dies, with a hole in his skull. A trooper 
 mentions a case beside which sudden death 
 would be a deliverance. " Covered with 
 blood," his statement is about a comrade, 
 " he begged me to shoot him and put him 
 out of his misery." The trooper's heart is 
 riven by the request and the spectacle, and 
 in despair he has the impulse to run away; 
 in despair he remains, for he can be of 
 no assistance to the sufferer. "This is the 
 time you feel it," a Borderer mentions, 
 needlessly enough ; yet he is thinking, in 
 particular, of the return at night over 
 ground which the battle has sown — 
 
 " You are marching back when, suddenly, 
 you come across something white, which 
 shines out from the inky darkness. On 
 examining it, you are shocked, perhaps, to 
 discover that it is the dead face of a friend." 
 146
 
 The Roll Call 
 
 Or there may still be a spark of" life left 
 under that white skin, those fixed eyelids. 
 Perhaps, because " It's splendid to see the 
 fellows trying to stifle their groans," and be 
 as whole men. Those who can, will draw at 
 a pipe, or whifF a cigarette, which they call 
 for short a " fag " ; and the contented spirit 
 is everywhere. On how slight a soil does it 
 blossom ! 
 
 A man has his face mutilated, his throat 
 gashed, his chest lacerated, all the evil doing 
 of a shell, but he is cheerful. Another 
 is kept alive, despite his wounds, through 
 a night bivouac, by two comrades who 
 lie close on either side, sheltering him, keep- 
 ing him warm. He is the soul of the small 
 company. Several wounded men find them- 
 selves in a nullah, where they have crawled 
 so as to be out of the line of fire, and their 
 cheeriness is extreme. Twice an officer gives 
 his coat to wounded soldiers, and each time 
 it returns. Has it, in these instances, be- 
 come a shroud ? or do the soldiers repay the 
 officer in his own goodness ? He leaves us 
 to guess. 
 
 147
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 ^ "I shall never," says a London Fusilier, 
 " forget the wounded being taken to the 
 hospital in one continuous string. You 
 could see tears in our chaps' eyes at the 
 sight." It is the wounded, as they go 
 
 ; past, who have to laugh these tears away. 
 They come out of the battle with the spirit 
 which filled them when they entered it. A 
 trumpeter has for days joked his gunner 
 friend, " I bet I shall be the first to be shot." 
 It is the froth of a high heart, nothing more, 
 but alas ! the event happens so. 
 
 " Good-night, mother," is the last message 
 of an Inniskilling ; " I'm for dangerous duty 
 to-night. God bless you all ! " But he is 
 in no wise despondent. Should he fall, it will 
 be as a soldier ; and, please, "It is my wish 
 that father should wear my medal every 
 Sunday on his right breast ; it is not against 
 regulations." How the mere suggestion of 
 red tape jars ! It pulls you up with a jerk. 
 Should our Inniskilling survive to wear the 
 medal himself, will not his home-coming now 
 be a triumph ? Alas, there is the other 
 picture, and how frequently it occurs, filling 
 you with sorrow. 
 
 148
 
 The Roll Call 
 
 A Derbyshire is losing grip of the frail 
 hold which, as " a dangerously wounded," 
 he has on the regimental roll. His sergeant 
 whispers to him, " Have you any special 
 request to make ? " " You might," he 
 answers, " write to poor mother and tell her 
 that by the time she receives the letter, I shall 
 be laid low." " No, chum," the sergeant 
 tries to belie his own knowledge, " you must 
 not give way." The Derbyshire sleeps for 
 a spell, and on waking, whispers, " Ask 
 mother to look after my dear children." 
 With that he passes. 
 
 To a fond wife, in Buckinghamshire, there 
 arrives one morning an epistle which contains 
 the sentence, " As we are likely to go into 
 action any day, there is no saying which 
 letter may be the last, for it's a sure thing 
 some of us must go. But I hope and trust 
 that will not be my lot." The same morn- 
 ing the wife is widowed by an official 
 communication, telling her that her husband 
 has been killed. This is the hard message of 
 the distant battlefield. 
 
 The empty pauses in the calling of the 
 149
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 roll bring hot tears, even from soldierly 
 fortitude. " Lots of those who were 
 mortally wounded " — we once more have the 
 bitter taste of Spion Kop — " had left wives 
 and children at home. When they knew 
 they had got their death-wounds, it was 
 pitiful to hear them crying to God to be 
 merciful to their wives — not a murmur for 
 themselves." Mother, wife, children ; or it 
 may be a sweetheart who is near, in spirit, 
 when life goes out. 
 
 A New Zealander receives a letter from 
 the girl he has left behind him, and her 
 latest portrait, specially taken for him, is in 
 it. He writes a reply, but has not been able 
 to post it when he is called into a fight. 
 With him go her letter, his loving answer, 
 and the portrait, all in a breast pocket. He 
 is of the slain, and the letters are found 
 striped with his blood, the fatal bullet having 
 pierced them and then the heart. He has 
 not had time to take farewell of the portrait. 
 The pathos of this is reflected in the message 
 of a sailor to his sister, who has sent him her 
 photograph. " I'll carry it with me, in case 
 150 
 
 ft>
 
 The Roll Call 
 
 I get a bullet, so that I may have a look 
 at it." 
 
 The chances of war let a gunner live to 
 fight another day, although a bullet has 
 driven at his left breast. It lodges in a pack 
 of cards which he has in the pocket of his 
 khaki jacket. The point which he magnifies 
 is not his escape, but the precise manner of 
 it. The bullet has ended its course only 
 before the last card of the pack, an ace of 
 spades. Spades of another sort are needed 
 on heights like Spion Kop, meant to be held 
 after being carried. But where clings the 
 kind earth in which intrenchments may be 
 dug ? The reply is the heavy casualty list, 
 with notes on it such as the following — 
 
 *' During the night we were formed up in 
 a line and our names called. Our colonel 
 told us that half of our men were killed and 
 wounded, and that a lot were missing. He 
 asked us all to pray to God to bring us 
 through, and we did so and also for our 
 wounded. I cannot write any more ; my 
 heart is broken for my fallen comrades." 
 
 But ever the cheery voice is raised, " It's 
 151
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 a rough job, still we're the boys to do it ; " 
 or, " Think only of our glorious victories, 
 and leave the pain, the agony, and the hard- 
 ships to us." What these are, we compre- 
 hend when the war-shield is turned round. 
 " Oh yes, there's a great deal of glory in 
 war ! It looks all right in history books for 
 children, but there is more * gory ' than glory 
 in it." The homily is provoked by sight of 
 a stretcher, passing along, with an object in 
 which there once dwelt the joy of life. 
 
 A colonel conjures his regiment, " Men, 
 you are making a name for yourselves which 
 will never die." " No doubt we were," 
 soliloquises a private, " but the cost is very, 
 very dear." Yet none will sink into a 
 desolate grave ; always somebody will be at 
 its side to write home — 
 
 " I trust it will be a little comfort to you 
 to know that, though he was away from 
 friends, he was well looked after, and laid 
 away by good people." 
 
 Hear that quick-firer, interrupting the 
 calling of the roll, with its noise as of 
 hammering upon a zinc roof! Watch the 
 152
 
 The Roll Call 
 
 stern composure of the Highlanders, who 
 hold aloof from the Christmas frivolities ! 
 They are mourning for those who are "a' 
 wed awaV' and they are nursing vengeance. 
 Hear George shouting for Charlie, fearful 
 that he may be among the wreckage of the 
 day. " At last I saw the young devil, as 
 whole as I was, but white as the dawn, and 
 didn't we shake hands ! " These are the 
 lights that rise and fall, on the making up 
 of the accounts after a battle. 
 
 There are some so lurid that even in the 
 hours of hottest blood they revolt unspeak- 
 ably. " It was a shocking sight," we have 
 the statement about Spion Kop ; " fellows 
 got smashed with shell, their bodies were set 
 on fire, and there they lay being slowly 
 cremated." Two dead men lie side by side 
 on another hill, a shell bursts near them, and 
 their clothes catch fire. " No water to put 
 the fire out, and they had to burn, burn. 
 Ugh ! It was awful." But what are words 
 here ? 
 
 A Welsh soldier witnesses a scene which 
 graves itself into his Celtic temperament, ever 
 153
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 easiest to mould, one way or the other. - He 
 has made a cigarette with some ammunition 
 paper and hard tobacco, and he looks round 
 for firing to it. Yonder, apparently, blazes 
 a small kopje fire, so he hies him towards it, 
 but is called back by somebody. Why ? 
 Because that kopje fire is a dead body to 
 which a shell has set a match. 
 
 After that, it is almost a minor trial for a 
 Yorkshire, marching in the quiet of night, to 
 trip over a corpse. " At the moment the 
 moon shone out, showing up his face ; he 
 seemed to be looking straight at me." The 
 story of a Christmas card, taken from a khaki 
 tunic, furnishes its own sad consolation. He 
 who has put the card into the warmth of 
 his heart is dead, but the message, " All good 
 wishes for a happy Christmas ! " is a key to 
 the smile on the rigid lips. Death brings 
 together, while it divides. Terrible, to us 
 looking from the outer world, the process 
 may appear. In reality it may be a romance, 
 for death is full of romance ; in death there is 
 love, as well as in life. 
 
 It is good to think thus when the horrors 
 154
 
 The Roll Call 
 
 thicken. We are told of cases where, heads 
 being blown off by shells, the bodies remain 
 erect for a little, or rise up from the ground, 
 rifle clutched in the right hand, even walk 
 several yards. " A fellow in front of me 
 walked about three yards without his head ; 
 a shell took it clean off, and he kept on 
 walking ,• it made me feel sick I can tell you." 
 Only one detail is required to complete this 
 gruesome spectacle. It is the assertion that a 
 headless corpse keeps afoot until the nearest 
 soldier, scared nigh out of his wits, pushes it 
 over. 
 
 There are various tales of the sort, all, 
 surely, the reddest horrors of modern war- 
 fare. 
 
 A soldier is at the " present," with his 
 finger on the trigger, when he is hit in the 
 temple by a bullet. Thus his body lies face 
 to the foe, a possible dealer-out of death even 
 then, if the almost incredible report of an 
 affair after Spion Kop is to be accepted. 
 For a private vouches to this — 
 
 " A man of ours was shot dead just as he 
 was about to press the trigger, and he re- 
 155
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 mained in that position and stiffened. The 
 Boers came on the field early next morning 
 and took several of our wounded prisoners. 
 One walked to this man, and laid hold of his 
 rifle to drag it away, when it went off, killing 
 the Boer." 
 
 Death has been on the watch, and itself 
 pulls the trigger — death the unknowable ! 
 What a creep goes with a gunner's death, as 
 described by his friend ! The latter exclaims 
 to himself, about a shell, " Ah, that's got 
 some of us ! " He feels his limbs — " Mind 
 you cannot tell for a minute after whether 
 you are hit ! " — and then has a look round. 
 His comrade is down, groaning, " What's 
 up ? " " It's all right ; I'm not hit ; it's only 
 the shock." " Then don't pull such a face, 
 old fellow ! " With that the writer turns 
 elsewhere, and on returning, to his amaze- 
 ment, finds his companion a corpse. A 
 splinter of shell has penetrated the man's 
 heart, and as for that conversation, " I think 
 he was dead when he spoke to me." 
 
 It is undertaker's news to learn of coffins 
 being found in a laager and burned for fuel, 
 156
 
 The Roll Call 
 
 " as we happened to be short of firewood." 
 Yet that is a mere pass-word to the cemetery 
 of a battle-field ; to the trenches into which 
 the slain are put, and to the ordeal of their 
 much-moved sextons, the survivors. " It 
 was the worst sight of all," a Grenadier says 
 of the interments after Belmont, " to see such 
 fine big fellows buried like so many cattle." 
 A sapper uses the same expression for another 
 scene, only conceivable when it has not been 
 possible at once to bury the dead : 
 
 *' The worst sight any one can imagine is 
 the battlefield two or three days after the 
 battle. The dead lie all around with the sun 
 on their faces. It is unbearable." 
 
 Burial and the unburied, they are a solemn 
 rebuke to war. Here is its bitterest cross ; 
 here are scenes that none can look upon and 
 be unmoved. Atkins, the lion-hearted, weeps, 
 and is careless of being seen in tears ; his 
 philosophy is not for the long trench, the 
 burial service, the buglers blowing the " Last 
 Post." Make a little anthology of his thoughts 
 by the graveside, and you will compre- 
 hend : — 
 
 157
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 " We buried our dead at night by the light 
 of candles — such a wonderful service ; every 
 word was spoken, every ' Amen ' came from 
 our hearts." 
 
 "When you dig graves, and put, perhaps, 
 twenty or twenty-five men into them, in 
 layers, till the day of Resurrection, and have 
 to step on the ones underneath while placing 
 the others on top, you get a bit sick of it, 
 and believe that life is uncertain." 
 
 " It was an impressive and sad scene, there 
 amidst the lonely veldt and kopjes, with the 
 sun's rays covering them in their last resting 
 place — a scene such as I never want to behold 
 again. My thoughts wandered back to dear 
 old peaceful Abergwili, amidst the dells and 
 valleys of beautiful Wales. I could not help 
 feeling sad for those away in Britain who 
 would be watching and waiting for their loved 
 ones." 
 
 It is the burial of the Suffolks, but the 
 sexton's carnival with the Highlanders is the 
 most heart-breaking of all. "I could not 
 sleep that night " is an engineer's simple, 
 eloquent memory of the graveyard at Magers- 
 158
 
 The Roll Call 
 
 fontein, which he helped to dig. For him 
 there will remain the dead faces of tartaned 
 Scotsmen ; faces set sternly northward, to- 
 wards the heights. 
 
 He hears again the words of the chaplain, 
 follows the plain, beautiful Presbyterian 
 service, and would fain ask, " O death, 
 where is thy sting ? O grave, where is thy 
 victory .? " Soft and loud, wailing and 
 defiant, the pipers have blown " The Flowers 
 of the Forest " across that golden veldt where 
 there is never a bloom of heather. " Loch- 
 aber no More " has cried itself out to the 
 winds of Africa, and been carried over-seas to 
 the Highland glens, the evil sough in the air 
 which heralds a bleak winter. 
 
 That is how the chief and his clansmen 
 have been buried, shoulder to shoulder, as the 
 sun dips, and shadows, not theirs, steal into 
 the karoo. 
 
 " I could not sleep " ; but they sleep with 
 fame for a pillow. 
 
 159
 
 IX.— SMILES AND TEARS 
 
 Times when laughter and tragedy play hide-and-seek with 
 each other, so attesting in war the great compromise of 
 human affairs. 
 
 " \ "^ THAT gets over me," a soldier who 
 V V has been shot through the foot 
 says impressively to the doctor, " is how it 
 ain't done more damage to my boot ! " 
 
 War is an object-lesson on the near relation- 
 ship of the smile and the tear, the laughable 
 and the tragic. It brings mirth and sorrow 
 together with a swiftness which would be 
 unreal in anything but human nature. For 
 it harmonises all notes, leaving us merely to 
 marvel thereat. Deep calls to shallow, and if 
 we put our ear to them we may hear what 
 they call. 
 
 A sergeant of the Irish Fusiliers and an 
 1 60
 
 Smiles and Tears 
 
 English gunner, both wounded, are assisting 
 each other towards the camp after an engage- 
 ment. Being asked how they feel, the 
 sergeant answers, " Shure, I'm only shot in 
 the head and the other fellow in three 
 places." He jokes in bullet holes. 
 
 A Yorkshireman's condition is thought to 
 be hopeless, he, also, having a wound in the 
 head, but he stubbornly asks for tobacco, and 
 observes, " Ah was varry near killed once 
 befoor, with fallin' off a house, but ah'm not 
 dead yet, an' ahm noan gown to dee." 
 From him we go to a trooper who binds his 
 hurts with the airy remark, " You don't get a 
 cigarette every time you hit your man, like I 
 did them pipes at Hammersmith." No doubt 
 the resolve of the Yorkshireman and the light- 
 some heart of the Cockney bring them ready 
 convalescence. 
 
 A Connaught Ranger has had his arm 
 broken by a shot, and it dangles from the 
 tendons. He smokes hard and curses the 
 enemy volubly, and his comrades know not 
 whether to sympathise with him or laugh at 
 him. Celtic tartar is in the outburst of 
 i6i M
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 another Irishman, when a shell explodes close 
 to him at Glencoe, " Och ! go to blazes wid 
 yez." He is full of anger at the idea of 
 having to retire from Glencoe, and flings it 
 hissing at the shell. May a flash of temper, 
 wrung from imperfect man, not lead to a V.C. 
 as certainly as cool daring or valiant resigna- 
 tion ? It is conceivable, for heroism has a 
 score of springs, some turgid, others still, as 
 with the wounded soldier who insists — 
 
 " I'm all right, old boy ; there's lots worse 
 than me lying around. Get them on the 
 stretchers first ; I can last out a bit. But 
 I'll tell you what you can do. See that case 
 of * fags ' ? Well just take one out and 
 stick it in my mouth. I've been watching it 
 for ever so long, but I could not pick it up. 
 I'd give anything for a smoke." 
 
 The speaker has both arms broken, and is 
 greedily eyeing a cigarette-case two yards 
 distant from the rock against which he has 
 propped himself. He can read on the little 
 treasure, the words, " From Alice to Fred in 
 memory of happier days ; " and he cannot 
 dry the starting tears. A touching order is 
 162
 
 Smiles and Tears 
 
 given to a regiment as it marches into Lady- 
 smith, just relieved: "You must not smoke 
 while you are passing through, on account of 
 the poor fellows who have been shut in." 
 They must first be set a-smoking, having 
 long wanted the good cheer ; having lived a 
 life to which there applies this story of a 
 sergeant, invited to take his share in a 
 musical evening : He can play or sing ? 
 " Oh yes," he answers, '' I can do the bones, 
 but I've ate 'em." Nor are the highlands of 
 Natal, in the stress of the campaign over their 
 wide area, a land flowing with milk and 
 honey for Atkins. Still in his half-hours 
 of ease, amid the hours of toil, he is eager to 
 be entertained, as witness this : 
 
 " I happened to find a bit of looking-glass. 
 It made a rare bit of fun. As it was passed 
 from comrade to comrade we said, ' Have a 
 last look at yourself, my boy, and bid yourself 
 goodbye.' The laugh went round ; then 
 ' Advance ! ' and we were all at it again." 
 
 Jack ashore discovers comedy to amuse the 
 army, in the military khaki into which his own 
 ship-shape form has been trussed. " I do 
 163
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 look comical in it. I'm going to bring it 
 home if I live long enough, and then you'll 
 just see how I look. Blue Devils is the name 
 the Boers give us ! " No v/onder. " We 
 are ashore with the Terrible s ammunition, 
 PowerfuV s guns, and our own men. What 
 price that ? Powerful guns, Terrible ammu- 
 nition, and the men are all Tartars." Jack 
 carries his command of graphic language with 
 him by land and sea. 
 
 A cherub of a middy, with a handful of 
 bluejackets, is sent to get some ammunition 
 from a gun-pit. The place is waist deep in 
 water, and the boy, while seeking for the 
 ammunition, falls in and is nearly drowned. 
 Fortunately he seizes a floating railway 
 sleeper, and on it sails back to firm ground, 
 and to the humour of his ducking. " Ah, 
 this is a gun-pit, is it ,'' I suppose it's a bally 
 army gun-pit." The bluejackets take him 
 off to camp and to bed, lest he should catch 
 cold and die. They cannot spare him. 
 
 A colour-sergeant gallantly saves four 
 wounded men from drowning in the flooded 
 Tugela. As he climbs the bank with the 
 164
 
 Smiles and Tears 
 
 last of them an officer takes his name, and 
 a minute later a flying bullet takes his life. 
 Valour is the name of that nameless colour- 
 sergeant ; valour, and a heart for the smitten 
 comrade. It is a royal service to die in. 
 Who would discern a grave at the end of such 
 an approach to it as, " Be jabers, this is a fine 
 counthry for a soldjier ; ye gets a bhlade of 
 grass six inches high, and ye finds cover 
 behind it, and when it gets to the last inch, 
 be jabers, look out ! " That is his satire 
 about seeking cover when there is none to 
 be obtained. Well, the worse the situation, 
 the more an inspiriting lilt is needed : 
 
 "When 'Long Tom' was dropping ninety- 
 six pound shells round about us, some one 
 starting singing, ' Why did I leave my little 
 back room in Bloomsbury ? ' and the whole lot 
 took it up. It did sound funny ! " 
 
 " Foightin', sorr ; can't help it — couldn't 
 resist the music any longer." This is the 
 defence of an Irish regimental cook, found in 
 the fighting-line instead of in his kitchen. 
 "And the other cooks — where are they.''" 
 " They're foightin' too, sorr ; couldn't help it, 
 165
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 sorr ; all making good practice, sorr." Perhaps 
 it is the same warrior who observes of another, 
 hit three times in quick succession, " Why, 
 the Boers must have taken him for the run- 
 nin' man." And we do discover a running 
 man, though in a different sense. 
 
 A soldier has reported himself sick, is 
 excused by the doctor from going with his 
 company on outpost duty, and is in his tent 
 all alone. There he is invaded by a wandering 
 shell, which, knocking over the box that he 
 sits on, sends him sprawling. It buries itself 
 without bursting, and so no harm is done, but 
 as for our sick soldier, " I can tell you he 
 soon put on his straps and ran after his com- 
 pany. You should have seen his face ; you 
 would have died laughing." Seeing it, we 
 should be asking ourselves, " What is fright 
 — simple, physical fright ^ " 
 
 It invades the bravest man, and as a panic 
 it will seize upon a body of the bravest men. 
 Fright ! Perhaps it is the refusal of the mind, 
 unnerved by some great surprise or shock, to 
 act its part as governor of the body. Tone 
 and power have to be recovered, and then 
 i66
 
 Smiles and Tears 
 
 fright and panic are cast forth with loathing. 
 They are like the wind of the desert ; no man 
 knows whither they come, in what element of 
 an incident they may lurk. A soldier has 
 fallen to a shot in the shoulder, and is being 
 lifted on to his feet by companions. 
 
 "That instant a bullet struck the ground 
 at his feet and he started off, running as hard 
 as he could go, with the other two after him. 
 We were in deadly peril, yet the humour of 
 the situation was irresistible. It was too 
 absurdly funny ! " 
 
 No sense of scare unnerves a Berkshire, who 
 naively writes home, " Tell father I shall get 
 the V.C. for promptitude in taking advantage 
 of all cover as per drill book." This is the 
 method of the young hopeful, using that 
 phrase seriously, for no doubt it was once so 
 used, only disappointment overtook it. There 
 is also large promise in a young soldier who 
 hits off the martinet officer in the following 
 manner : 
 
 " One man was in trouble for trying to 
 persuade a fly to shift off his nose by screw- 
 ing his face up. The charge was ' laughing 
 on parade.' " 
 
 167
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 As a commentator pithily observes, " It 
 was enough to make a 'bus horse laugh." 
 The 'bus horse, converted into a charger, 
 carries the alphabet of our London street 
 traffic to the front. We are bidden rejoice 
 over the animal " in our regiment " which 
 will stop if you shout " Off-sider up ! " He is 
 less gifted, however, than the beast which 
 thus brightens the march to Spion Kop : 
 
 "We were talking about the different funds 
 for widows and orphans, and somebody behind 
 asked which was the best. My chum called 
 out, ' Mansion House,' whereupon my horse 
 stopped dead, and would not move till there 
 arose the cry, ' Higher up, please.' Then 
 he went on slowly, all of which showed us 
 that he was one of the old London 'bussers." 
 
 The store of mirth that Atkins discovers 
 in his own appearance is inexhaustible, but 
 the wrinkles of suffering and hardship lurk in 
 the background. " We are getting a fine 
 high-bred look," says a sergeant who has 
 starved in Ladysmith. The mystery about a 
 particularly stout Highlander is how he keeps 
 stout, until it dawns upon himself, " Why, I 
 1 68
 
 Smiles and Tears 
 
 must be full of breeze." He shakes in his 
 shoes at the prompt banter, " Man Jock, gin 
 ye get shot I'll howk ye oot for a sentry-box." 
 
 A neighbour of his presently goes jumping 
 about in the zone of fire, and when warned to 
 lie down, explains his conduct — '* Just haud a 
 wee till I catch this lark." It is not so 
 apparent an amusement as the holding of 
 a helmet above a stone, in order that it may 
 have airholes, to keep the head cool, drilled 
 through it by the enemy. " When I am walk- 
 ing about," we get the confidence, " the fellows 
 who don't know how it was done, exclaim, 
 'It's a marvel that bloke's alive.' " He chuckles 
 to himself, but one morning he forgets, and 
 raises the helmet with his head in it. 
 
 The hand of the wag is apparent in an 
 order for which some church parade is made 
 responsible, " Presbyterians must go washed ; 
 Church of England may go unwashed." 
 Small things are seized upon for laughter, 
 as when one of Roberts's Horse, being left on 
 the veldt, approaches a casual Cockney with 
 the inquiry, " Have you seen anything of 
 Roberts's Horse ? " and is answered, " No, 
 169
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 has he lost it ? What's its colour ? I have 
 a spare pony here which he can have if it's 
 any use to him." Nor would it be a bad 
 mount if it happened to be " Black Diamond," 
 an animal of which a trooper is never tired of 
 speaking. They are great friends, and they 
 form a pleasant study of man and beast. 
 
 " Black Diamond " is real, natural, friendly 
 as a talking horse that an excellent fellow 
 educates against the tedium of Ladysmith ; 
 but the story of a South African baboon is 
 not convincing. A soldier is supposed to 
 catch sight of a figure atop a kopje, to 
 charge after it with eager ferocity and a 
 gleaming bayonet, and to drive the latter 
 into it, shouting in triumph, " I've got an 
 inimy at last, bedad ! " The indignant 
 owner of the pet baboon, a mirth-rent 
 company officer, and the bewildered Pat 
 are then gathered round the corpse, and 
 there dramatically left. 
 
 An ostrich hunt, with a brigade looking 
 on, brings us back to the affairs of sheer fun, 
 of wayward frolic. "We found a quiet-look- 
 ing old chap carrying some very nice feathers. 
 170
 
 Smiles and Tears 
 
 We got friendly with him by giving him 
 some of our biscuits. But when my chum 
 made a grab at his tail the ungrateful 
 ' chicken ' landed out with his left bunch of 
 claws. They caught Bob just where his 
 dinner ought to have been, and we haven't 
 chased ' chickens ' since then." A large 
 bird to write about, the ostrich ! 
 
 A soldier-father hears that Emmie's linnet 
 has died since he left home, and asks shall he 
 bring a young ostrich to replace it ? True, 
 it will eat more than the Untie and be a 
 trouble to look after when it grows up, but 
 then think of its beautiful feathers ! Aye, 
 and of a father's love ! How beautiful it 
 shines in this, the last letter of a soldier cast 
 for the grave : 
 
 " My own, it steels my arms and quickens 
 my blood, as I think of you and our dear 
 little Jack. I can see you in my mind's eye 
 tenderly bending over him as he sleeps, and 
 imprinting a kiss on his little chubby face. 
 May our Heavenly Father keep and guard 
 him until I return." 
 
 But turn — turn quickly — to some other 
 171
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 letter, and read, for relief, the odd inquiry 
 of a Highlander, " Did you ever taste 
 commandeered chicken ? " Perhaps not. 
 " It's sublime," he guarantees. The humour 
 of the private commissariat is considerable, 
 though with it there often goes the clamour 
 of an empty stomach. An Irishman happens 
 upon five eggs and boils them, only to lift 
 up his voice in subsequent despair. " Oh, 
 wasn't I surprised when I found that it was 
 chickens I had been cooking." Still hungry, 
 he encounters a gander, and putting it in the 
 pot blows the fire with relish. 
 
 He does not tell us whether, for sauce, he 
 mixes starch with pepper-corns and calls the 
 result blanc-mange. That recipe belongs to 
 one of the besiegea of Ladysmith, and he 
 gives this fair warning, " Tell mother to 
 keep her starch locked up when I come 
 home." A Yorkshireman also intimates a 
 habit which he may be expected to observe 
 as a result of long active service : 
 
 " I've forgotten what it is like to be at 
 home ; tell Charlie I'm going to pitch a tent 
 in the garden with strong intrenchments and 
 wire entanglements all round." 
 172
 
 Smiles and Tears 
 
 An artilleryman threatens to bring home 
 an army biscuit as a relic, feeling sure it will 
 not get broken on the way, unless somebody 
 jumps on it. " I shall," he reasons, " be able 
 to look at it in my grey-headed old age and 
 say, ' I wish I had as good teeth now as I 
 had then.' " The reticent story of a "terribly 
 big chap, six feet one, and awfully thin," is 
 very appealing as told by a comrade : 
 
 " He is always hungry, I know, though he 
 never complains. I saw him cooking mealies 
 the other day. He said he was cooking them 
 for his horse, but I knew better." 
 
 A member of the Town Guard of Kimberley 
 is ill and in hospital. " Have you any Idea," 
 inquires the doctor, " what's the matter with 
 you .? " " No, sir," he replies, " but I have 
 pains in m.y stomach." " You have no idea 
 what causes them ? '' " No, sir, unless it be 
 the horse wandering after the mealies." 
 Listen to the same rumble of want from a 
 troop of lancers who are on the hills of 
 Ladysmith, and to whom the orders for the 
 day announce " quarter rations." " The 
 men's jaws dropped six holes," says one of 
 173
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 the lancers, " but there wasn't a word." A 
 little later somebody cries, ' What's that 
 there ? ' Good God ! Could it be true, or 
 were we dreaming ? " They catch sight of 
 the advance guard of the relief column. 
 
 Beside that drama of hunger and hope, 
 of valour and stern endurance, a stretcher- 
 bearer with his trousers tied at the bottom, 
 is the clown. They are full of peaches, 
 gathered from some orchard, and the wearer 
 of them is a subject for vast general merri- 
 ment, ending in the suggestion from waggish 
 Atkins, " Say, old fellow, why don't you 
 turn yourself into a penny-in-the-slot 
 machine ! " The plight of an amateur cook 
 is different ; he has not allowed for the 
 swelling of a pudding, and therefore cannot 
 get it out of the pot. Probably the pot is 
 " accidentally broken " — some formula is 
 necessary ; but we are not told. Another 
 military cook is franker. " It happens to be 
 my day to cook," he says, " which accounts 
 for the unpleasant expression on some of the 
 fellows' faces." He is not certain whether it 
 is the flour or the suet that he has left out 
 174
 
 Smiles and Tears 
 
 of a "duff," but anyhow his comrades, having 
 eaten, are unanimously silent. They break 
 their silence to christen him " Lyddite." 
 
 We are soon tripping over the heart-strings 
 again. Wives and children are gladdening to 
 think, about, but black may braid the bright. 
 " It quite humanised us," a soldier says, *' to 
 see women and children once more ! " We 
 have the shadow from a second soldier who 
 happens upon a child's wealth of toys and 
 dolls, tiny cups and saucers, all overthrown 
 by the tide of war. He thinks of the absent 
 smiles of the little one, driven from her toys, 
 and soliloquises, " When war comes, does it let 
 anybody escape its touch ? War ! This also 
 is war ! It is the siege of mankind." Worse 
 to a King's Royal Rifleman than a siege is 
 the raising of it, for it brings him a mourning 
 letter. His father is dead, and the lament is, 
 " I knew he was looking forward to my coming 
 home." 
 
 A sermon to which a guardsman listens 
 
 is all about those he talked with the previous 
 
 morning, and helped to bury at night ; and 
 
 he is filled with sadness. But there is a 
 
 175
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 " Lead, kindly light " even amid " the 
 encircling gloom" of the battle. "Thank 
 God you have arrived ; I have been looking 
 for you all the morning," — this is the greet- 
 ing of a wounded man to a comrade who is 
 searching for him. " He and I were jesting, 
 coming out on the ship, and I said I would 
 be the one to pick him up if he fell, and so I 
 was." It is the exchange of brotherliness. 
 
 There is, too, an exchange of humour, at 
 all events of humorous things and situations, 
 as between Atkins and the enemy. The 
 former rigs up a dandy lancer, all straw 
 and khaki, and the latter hammer it with the 
 big guns — *' knocked particular blank out of 
 it," is the satisfying phrase of an artillery- 
 man — until they also discover the joke. 
 During a Sunday armistice at Mafeking a 
 Boer cries to the trenches of the besieged, 
 " Have you any whiskey .'' " The cry back 
 is *' Yes," and an invitation to call for it ; but 
 no, " he isn't having any." 
 
 Excellent is the yarn from Ladysmith 
 about some Boers who, under the folds of a 
 flag of truce, are passing the time of day 
 176
 
 Smiles and Tears 
 
 with Atkins. "They told us," it goes, 
 " that the British prisoners at Pretoria were 
 short of two men for the football team. 
 And so the Boers had been asked to capture 
 a half-back and a right wing forward from 
 the Gordons." This would be a new way of 
 conducting war, but then much has been new 
 and surprising. 
 
 A trumpeter and his friends discover that, 
 at a concert they have organised in a dull 
 townlet on the veldt. " One of the singers, a 
 little Dutch girl, gave the Boer version of 
 the battle of Majuba — in Dutch, of course. 
 Our fellows cheered the speaker like mad, 
 making it appear, in our high conceit, that 
 we understood. But when an old farmer 
 quietly explained the meaning of the song — 
 well, there was a silence." However, the 
 laugh is the other way when a Boer, fancying 
 he is on the spoor of his own people, runs 
 into a British patrol. " Ach ! I dink I haf 
 made a mistake ! " " Yes, I should think 
 you have ; give us your rifle." 
 
 Again, the expansive story-telling Tommy ! 
 He is also in a tale from Pieters Hill, of a 
 
 177 N
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 Boer throwing down his Mauser and saying, 
 " Don't shoot me ; I'm a field cornet." " I 
 don't care a hang if you're a brass band," is 
 the effulgent retort ; " hands up ! " That 
 token of surrender is needless ; the joke is 
 enough to petrify a commando of Boers. It 
 makes you sigh for the Scotsman of Lady- 
 smith, whose " mineral rights," as he holds, 
 cover a *' Long Tom " shell that has buried 
 itself in his garden. He has finish. 
 
 Quip and crank and wise humour we may 
 gather at leisure wherever Atkins camps. 
 But they are the froth, the pretty spume on 
 the surface, and when the wind lifts them 
 aside the gulfs of despond are seen yawning. 
 
 An Africander lady tells a sympathising 
 English soldier that she has a husband and 
 two sons ; that her sons are fighting on one 
 side, her husband on the other ; and that he 
 lives in dread lest he may slay the children 
 of his own body. 
 
 Her dread is still greater. 
 
 178
 
 '' In HosriTAL." — Atkins in hospital is, as lie ivould say hiiiisei/, "a 
 
 sight" — a king in cheerfidness . Has he a broken leg, and it set in 
 
 plaster of Paris ? He lightens the hours by trying to carve himself 
 
 into ^'' a plaster saint."
 
 X.— IN HOSPITAL 
 
 Red-letier tales from a teU'nig-house where hurts and ills 
 are borne with simple fortitude, robust cheerfulness, a 
 gay philosophy. 
 
 A SOLDIER is brought in from the 
 battlefield, which has taken a butcher's 
 toll of his once handsome face. He over- 
 comes the tragic silence that has fallen upon 
 him by asking, in signs, for a sheet of paper 
 and a pencil. They are given to him. 
 
 Naturally he will want to know what the 
 doctors think of his case, whether there is 
 any hope for him .'* That is the way when a 
 waft of the last trump comes from afar ; 
 Nature hesitates to surrender the spirit, the 
 great sceptre of being, because, losing it, she 
 loses all. 
 
 Only a noble soul may enter this fight 
 with the flesh and emerge victorious, but our 
 179
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 soldier is splendidly victorious. It is not of 
 himself he is thinking, as he toils out his 
 question in straggling letters. What is it ^ 
 It is this : " Did we win ^ " 
 
 The heroism of Atkins in hospital has 
 been a light, lighting all the darkness there. 
 But first, is he wounded, cast away, in some 
 corner of the embattled veldt ? His chief 
 anxiety, so a nurse informs us, is whether he 
 will be found, since a fight with long-range 
 arms scatters the victims over an immense 
 stretch of ground. It is strange what 
 torture for the mind there lies in the un- 
 certain. A broken leg, a broken arm ! 
 These are, and are what they are, but the 
 thought, " Suppose they don't find me ^ " 
 drags the mind to the edge of an abyss. 
 
 When the searchers arrive the black 
 uncertainty lifts, and broken limbs are 
 merely an occasion for self-sacrifice. " We 
 started to go forward," says a member of an 
 ambulance corps, " and soon came across lots 
 of wounded. Some, who were so badly hit 
 that they could hardly stand, were helping 
 others. On our offering aid they answered, 
 1 80
 
 In Hospital 
 
 ' No, no, my lads ; lower down you'll find 
 many who can't move.' " 
 
 On to those others, this being Coienso, 
 where the swathe of the scythe is wide. " All 
 around us we heard cries of * Water, water for 
 the love of God ! ' A man would take just a 
 little although we kept saying ' Have more.' 
 He would answer, ' No, there are still others 
 ahead.' " No man is for himself, but all 
 are for the relief of those in suffering 
 elsewhere. 
 
 " They showed the utmost pluck and 
 endurance," an eminent surgeon testifies 
 about the wounded at Coienso ; " there 
 was no despondency, but on the contrary 
 anxiety to return to the fight. This was 
 very splendid of them after such a day as 
 they had experienced, and makes one feel 
 proud of their fine mettle." 
 
 " My brave man ! " It is the praise of 
 Joubert to an English reservist, with thigh- 
 bone and ankle broken, who has only desisted 
 from fighting when he has no more cart- 
 ridges. His shattered limbs get into a 
 tangle as he falls beneath his wounds, and he 
 i8i
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 seems helpless there on the ground. But a 
 comrade carries out his request, " Turn me 
 over, Jack," and then he can load and shoot, 
 heedless of his torture. Brave man indeed ! 
 It is an honour afterv/ards to shake his hand. 
 
 A wounded Irish officer, as one of his 
 friends in the rank and file narrates, is being 
 carried down a kopje on a stretcher. A 
 bearer trips on a rock, and the officer is 
 jolted so that his pains cry doubly. But he 
 says, thoughtfully, " All right, orderly, I 
 know you couldn't help it ! " That is the 
 good heart which will not let another bear 
 the pain of self-reproach ; the heart which 
 wins all to itself and is the conqueror even 
 after it has ceased to beat. 
 
 " What bothered me," remarks a soldier, 
 who has been hit five times, " was the shot 
 that went through my lungs, because it 
 caused me to breathe short." He has 
 nothing to tell of the other four bullets, 
 and would have been silent altogether, but 
 for that detail. Then there is the warrior 
 who is asked, " Are you much hurt ? " and 
 who answers " Oh, not so bad. I've just 
 182
 
 In Hospital 
 
 got a graze on the head, a bullet through 
 the arm, and a second in my ribs, which I'm 
 carrying back to camp." Of such is the 
 road to the hospital. 
 
 " It's a treat," a colonial declares, *' to 
 see the Tommies — we're all Tommies now 
 and joyfully ! — when their wounds are being 
 dressed. You may ask them twenty times if 
 they are feeling any pain and they will say 
 ' No,' or ' Only a trifle,' until at last they 
 collapse." The evidence in support of this is 
 extensive and peculiar. 
 
 A Northumbrian boasts of a Christmas 
 box, and then describes it as a quarter of an 
 ounce of lead in his leg. He is less well 
 dowered than the fellow of jest, who being 
 hailed, " How did you get on. Bill ? " shouts 
 back, " Got a bally lead mine in me. Want 
 to stake out a few claims ? " 
 
 A Highland captain is carried to the 
 doctors in a state of varied damage. He 
 has been hit seven times, and the doctors 
 have to cut off his gay tartans to get at his 
 wounds ; yet he is cheerful. Before settling 
 down to a severe amputation he dictates a 
 183
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 letter to his mother. His report to her is, 
 " I have had several severe knocks — pretty 
 hard knocks." That, he thinks, will re- 
 assure her, but he forgets that a mother's 
 instincts are as actual knowledge. 
 
 We happen upon a lancer " in dock for 
 repairs," as he calls it, but still grandly full 
 of the glamour of combat. For excitement, 
 he holds that " shells and bullets beat foot- 
 ball altogether." They are such splendid 
 playthings ! But he lets his doubts appear 
 in the postscript, " This leaves me with 
 a smile on my face, only I'll say goodbye, 
 lest we should never meet again." He 
 sees the shadow of a long, last separation. 
 
 It is almost at hand for a stricken soldier 
 and his sweetheart overseas. " Wouldn't 
 you," the nurse asks him, " like to send a 
 message to anybody — anybody in par- 
 ticular ? " He understands, and the 
 woman's tact which has informed him, floods 
 his heart with the absent woman. "Yes," 
 he mutters, " I would like to send a message 
 — a message to my girl." " What shall I 
 say ? " inquires the nurse, putting the point 
 184
 
 In Hospital 
 
 of her pencil to the paper. She waits gently 
 on the dying man's emotion, struggling to 
 express itself. " Yes," he whispers, " give 
 her my kind regards." 
 
 A knight of tenderness is Atkins for his 
 womankind — sweetheart and wife, mother and 
 Queen. " Sister, sister," a patient in hos- 
 pital enjoins, " lock my box of chocolate up 
 at once. If you don't, I'll eat it, and I want 
 mother to get it quite perfect by the first 
 mail." To the soldier who is well, that 
 chocolate is an inspiration ; but to the 
 soldier wounded or ill, it is sacred. It is 
 the Mother- Queen visiting his bedside, as it 
 were, with a greeting which falls on his ear 
 as home and love and country — all that is 
 dear and true and good. " Oh, that her 
 Majesty could have beheld the joy which 
 shone in the face of many a sufferer." The 
 extract is from a letter which goes on : — ■ 
 
 " A poor fellow lay in bed badly wounded, 
 and as we told him of the gift of the Queen 
 a light came into his pale, pain-drawn face, 
 which a pen like mine can scarcely describe. 
 The two attendants raised him, while the 
 185
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 sergeant-major held up the book, and in that 
 position, and with a happy, worn smile, he 
 wrote his name. Then I handed him the 
 chocolate and he sank back exhausted, and 
 presently he fell asleep. When I passed 
 round at night, I stopped by his side, and 
 saw that in his sleep he still clutched the 
 precious packet." 
 
 It is sweet to dream sweetly. Dream- 
 land is free to all, calling soul to soul, in 
 adversity, as in happy circumstances. " To- 
 night," we hear a voice from over the wall 
 which divides war into sides — " to night I 
 was on duty in the Dutch Prayer House 
 which is our hospital. An EngHshman 
 began, in his dreams, to sing quite softly, 
 first a soldier's song, then ' Rule Britannia * 
 and finally — and so softly — that touching 
 song, ' Home Sweet Home.' " No cata- 
 logue would hold the touching incidents of 
 the war hospitals, nor is a catalogue the place 
 for them. 
 
 " Take it to my pal first," an orderly is 
 ordered about a water-bottle ; " he's worse 
 hit than I am." The speaker is dead next 
 1 86
 
 In Hospital 
 
 morning, while his comrade lives to mourn 
 for him. " Being told," another tragedy 
 reads, " that my poor old chum was dying, I 
 hurried to his bedside. He was raving for 
 his wife. I tried to soothe him, but of a 
 sudden he sprang up and with a cry for his 
 wife, fell back in my arms — dead." The 
 manner of his going — that cry for her — will 
 be her poor consolation. 
 
 A corporal of the Argylls, who has had 
 his scalp shot away, is asked how he feels. 
 Without answering the question, he demands 
 in broad Scots " Hoo's Captain Cawmill ? " 
 This is the officer of his company, his 
 immediate chief of the Campbell line. He is 
 all concern for him. Young Highland 
 chieftains used to go into the reek of battle, 
 with foster-brothers beside them for guardian 
 angels. The sentiment which was there 
 still lives beneath the tartan. 
 
 Sentiment often makes sunshine, and in 
 unexpected ways and quarters. When a 
 soldier has fallen, his kit is put to auction, 
 and in their regard for him, his comrades 
 name their best money against its contents. 
 187
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 They know that there may be a widow, a 
 mother, or orphans, to whom the amount 
 realised will be a godsend. A Suffolk is 
 reported killed, his kit is therefore sold, and 
 the proceeds, with his deferred pay, are trans- 
 mitted to his mother. She is lifted from her 
 sorrow, and out of her threadbare black 
 frock, a month or two later, when she hears 
 that her son is still alive. He is getting well 
 in one of the enemy's hospitals, having, with 
 his sore wounds, been succoured by them 
 after the fight. 
 
 Hatred between the opposing men engaged 
 in war is infrequent, as we gather from scenes 
 ever recurring in the hospitals. A Yorkshire 
 sergeant has " a Boer for a bed chum," and 
 the pair make friends in a great way. Another 
 Briton and another Boer find it convenient to 
 be as brethren. They have only a right and 
 left arm between them, for each has lost one. 
 At first they receive their allowances of 
 tobacco in despair, not being able to roll it 
 into cigarettes. " Here, mate," suggests the 
 resourceful Atkins, "just you move a bit 
 closer, and we'll give a hand each to the 
 1 88
 
 In Hospital 
 
 cigarette-making." Thus they surmount the 
 difficulty. 
 
 Tobacco smoke is special comfort for the 
 man on his way from the fighting line to the 
 hospital. " Never mind my leg, let that look 
 after itself; be a good chap and give us a 
 pipe ; I'm dying for a smoke." Next day 
 the speaker of these w^ords has his leg taken 
 off by the surgeons. An East Anglian, shot 
 through the groin, exclaims to himself, "Well, 
 I'd better have a smoke." This is the spirit 
 of resignation which belongs to the whole 
 army of wounded, or, as a witness puts it : — 
 
 " You scarcely hear a mm^mur ; in fact 
 dying men have asked me for a cigarette." 
 
 A boy. soldier who is being operated upon, 
 confides to the surgeon, " I wouldn't care, 
 only I've lost my ' fags '." He does not go 
 smokeless, though he is in hospital, nor 
 does a convalescent who is up and sitting 
 about. He is an engaging character, as be- 
 hold his intimation, " There is a gentleman 
 here who gives two cigars to every soldier 
 passing his house. I've come in for four, 
 having passed twice." A mere accident 
 189
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 that ? The gentle craft, as of an angler cast- 
 ing for a trout, quite disarms one's censure. 
 There is a more serious case against the 
 writer of the following : — 
 
 *' I should doubtless have been on my back 
 in that hospital now, had it not been for a 
 wondrous duplicity that taught me how to 
 manipulate the thermometer so as to make my 
 temperature normal. The result of the 
 harmless fraud was that I got an ounce of 
 whiskey and a pint of soup per day. Oh the 
 joy of that whiskey ! " 
 
 Perhaps it turns him to the making of 
 jokes. " It's a funny thing," a rifleman 
 notes, " but upon my word I've heard more 
 wit from fellows who have been wounded, 
 than I have heard in times of peace." A 
 Londoner, with injuries that look deadly, 
 strikes up a lively song, and even contrives to 
 sing it in tune. An Irishman who has been 
 battered like a target shouts to his ward 
 neighbour, in the tone of one who has made 
 a discovery, " Why, thim Boers can't shoot 
 for nuts." He recovers. It is an Irishman 
 gifted with a genial sarcasm who calls to his 
 190
 
 In Hospital 
 
 nurse, " Bejabers, bring me a tin whistle and 
 I'll play the ' Cock o' the North.' " Nay, he 
 is hopeful that his broken leg, while it holds 
 him to bed, will yet permit him to play any 
 other tune the company would desire. 
 " What's yer choice, ladies and gentlemen ^ " 
 he demands. 
 
 But if he were to play, it might tempt a 
 Dublin Fusilier to dance, and he admits, rue- 
 fully, that a hole in his leg has ended his 
 dancing days. " Still," he cheers himself up, 
 " I'll be as good a singer as ever, and I'll raise 
 sport wherever I am, as my heart is as light 
 as a feather." Many courageous hearts ride 
 into hospital, in a string of ambulances, for 
 out of these depths comes the mocking echo, 
 " Bank, Bank ; penny all the way ! " A full 
 private innocently flings at a general officer 
 the inquiry, " Hullo, where have they hit 
 you, old cock .'' Strike me lucky, they've 
 ' kopped ' me in three places." The officer 
 laughs. 
 
 "You would be amazed," a nurse com- 
 ments, " to find how men recover who have 
 been riddled with bullets. Such wounds do 
 191
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 remarkably well, and I think I'm sorriest 
 for the soldiers attacked by dysentery and 
 typhoid. They feel it greatly, and would 
 much rather be wounded ; they look on it as 
 a disgrace to be in hospital for any other 
 reason." No sooner said than a Grenadier 
 appears with proof of it. 
 
 " I'm afraid," he confesses, " that the fever 
 has put a top hat on me, as it has shortened 
 my breath and weakened my legs. All the 
 same I have a little bit of strength left for 
 Pretoria, and I should break my heart if I 
 were left here." 
 
 It must be as difficult to be a hero after an 
 attack of typhoid as to be a hero to the 
 proverbial valet. To quote a Royal Fusilier, 
 who speaks from ill experience, " You aren't 
 in the best of spirits when your internal 
 economy feels like a skittle alley in full 
 swing." 
 
 The interest of Atkins in medical matters 
 yields us the deliverance, " No man can fight 
 his best on an empty stomach." But the 
 doctors explain it by saying that they can cure 
 a man of a wound in the stomach if he has 
 192
 
 In Hospital 
 
 fasted for twelve hours beforehand. Person- 
 ally I'd prefer to have a feed and take my 
 chance." This is rather a cryptic deliverance, 
 like so many things that bother our curiosity, 
 especially in the epistles of Atkins ; only the 
 last sentence is clear enough, and clearly 
 enough sincere. Perhaps rations have been 
 short somewhere, or we should not be getting 
 those views on the best stomach for a fight. 
 
 Obviously it is a good one that permits a 
 Black Watch private to joke, in hospital, after 
 Magersfontein, " I'm the living wonder ; shot 
 six times and won't kill." Then an Irishman 
 — for the hurt Irishman, with humour gushing 
 from him, is prevalent — walks into a field- 
 hospital and remarks, "Dochtir, I jist want 'e 
 to take from my jaw here, a bullet that's 
 knocked out two of my teeth." " Sit down ! 
 Is that the only place where you feel pain — 
 where the bullet is ? " " That's all, and that's 
 plinty." " No pain elsewhere .? " " Sorra 
 bit ; only I'm confused like." " No wonder ; 
 the bullet got into your jaw through the top 
 of your head." 
 
 A wound there, robs a Gordon Highlander 
 193 O
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 of consciousness. He has been charging at 
 the head of his company and crying " Come 
 on, boys ! Come on, boys ! " A bullet in 
 the knee, a second in the thigh, a third in the 
 ribs, but on he rushes like a Highland torrent. 
 A fourth in the head "drops" him, and in 
 hospital he keeps shouting, " Come on, boys ! 
 Come on, boys ! " He will have four bullets 
 to carry home as keepsakes, for Atkins, while 
 he may be indifferent to wounds, treasures the 
 shot and shell that inflict them. 
 
 His treasures are a collection. An hospital 
 sister has a patient who opens his hand to 
 show her a ring. " From my girl," he says, 
 *' and when I was hit I made up my mind 
 that no enemy should get it, so I kept it in 
 my hand ready to swallow if necessary." A 
 young soldier, just arrived in hospital, asks 
 excitedly for his haversack. He clings to it 
 desperately, all because there are two small 
 turtles inside. He has collected them against 
 the return to " England, home, and beauty," 
 and that is why he values them, rather than 
 for themselves. 
 
 To the surgeon or the nurse, who has been 
 194
 
 In Hospital 
 
 his good friend, we find Atkins rich in grati- 
 tude. " Doctors very busy," he says shrewdly ; 
 " a fine place this for the young hands to get 
 practice." He is willing to fall in love with 
 the nurse who has smoothed his pillow, and 
 written tenderly to the wife of his " dead 
 chum." We love those who serve in the 
 name of sympathetic love ; and moreover a 
 nurse may be an attractive little woman. 
 Listen to this outpouring of heart, all pro- 
 voked by her : 
 
 " The nurse attending me was a handsome 
 girl with a Greek profile, reddish brown hair 
 — the kind that seems full of golden tendrils 
 in the sunlight — and eyes as liquid as a 
 fawn's. The first time she put her finger on 
 my wrist my pulse ran up to at least a 
 hundred and seventy-five, and she took it for 
 granted that I had a high fever. I tried often 
 to allure her into conversation, but she 
 wouldn't be lured. She was strictly business. 
 
 " When I started to pay her compliments 
 
 she would ask me to put out my tongue, 
 
 which is an obstacle to conversation, I used 
 
 to lie there with my tongue hanging out, 
 
 195
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 trying to put my whole soul into my eyes, 
 but it was no go. No man can look romantic 
 with half a foot of furry red tongue. Another 
 way she had of gagging me was by putting 
 the thermometer in my mouth. She was an 
 excellent young woman, with lots of common 
 sense, as was evidenced by the fact that she 
 gave me no encouragement whatever." 
 
 Happily our love-sick patient does not 
 threaten any desperate act as a result of his 
 disappointment. His heart mends, like the 
 rest of him. 
 
 196
 
 
 •4! "54 
 
 
 
 
 '€ g 

 
 XI.— ONE TOUCH OF NATURE 
 
 Showing the threads that knit fighting men in a common 
 brotherhood, even while they wrestle for mastery, in 
 the scarlet surge of war. 
 
 THE story of a Briton and a Boer who 
 meet in arms and part in affection 
 illustrates that one touch of nature which 
 makes all the world kin, even when war does 
 rage. 
 
 Those two drive at each other on a kopje, 
 each seeking the other's life, which is the 
 trade of the battle. The hand-to-hand 
 struggle falls out so evenly that both are 
 wounded, and both go, in the same ambu- 
 lance, to a British hospital. In it they lie 
 neighbours, grow firm friends, and vow the 
 friendship shall live. Then when the time 
 for parting comes the Briton exclaims, as the 
 197
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 last word of the goodbye, " Wasn't it a fine 
 thing we met ! " 
 
 It is a joy to watch how personal amity 
 springs from under the harrow of national 
 strife. Touch the right spot and the roll of 
 guns dies out in a quiet conversation and an 
 exchange of home thoughts. The coming 
 together may be by a lurid road, but mutual 
 respect lights it, and that is much. 
 
 " He sat above me on a rock smoking his 
 pipe and taking deliberate pot shots at me," 
 says a Borderer about an antagonist. " Such 
 impudence could not be borne, and by a 
 lucky fluke I put him out of action at my 
 fourth shot." 
 
 Out of action ! The phrase here takes a 
 new meaning, so delicate that you might 
 overlook it ; for sympathy and regard, as of 
 one fighting man towards another, are meant 
 to be conveyed. Thanks be that the other 
 duellist is only wounded ! Let him live to 
 fight another day ; it is enough to overcome 
 him in the duel. The winner has none of 
 the lust of killing, and would regret the full 
 tragedy ; indeed his victory is greater. 
 198
 
 One Touch of Nature 
 
 Being a hero, Atkins esteems the higher 
 qualities in others, and the harder they make 
 the fight for him the greater is this esteem. 
 " It is impossible," we read in one letter, 
 *' not to admire the show these fellows have 
 made, but it's all so useless." " I rather like 
 them," another scribe sets down, " for the 
 way they are standing up for their country." 
 And then of a leader, " You cannot help 
 admiring him ; after all, he is a rare game 
 one." When men are seeing the other world 
 in each other's eyes, they do not look for the 
 baser qualities of this world. Test that by 
 the challenge which occurs in the rank-and- 
 file history of Colenso, as being flung, from 
 Irishmen to Irishmen, across the Tugela : 
 
 "Just before the fight the Irish Brigade 
 with the Boers sent a note to our Dublin 
 Fusiliers, saying they would be glad to have 
 the opportunity of wiping them out. The 
 note was returned by the Dublins with the 
 promise that they would walk through the 
 Irish Brigade as the devil walked through 
 Athlone." 
 
 This sounds fierce, but is it anything more 
 199
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 than a gay defiance, a mutual contract to 
 fight the thing as Christians should ? There 
 the Irish speak for the two camps, and, in- 
 deed, the Irish nature, so rich in imagination, 
 so quick of sympathy, has often been a link 
 between races unlike each other in their 
 ways. There may even be a drawing closer 
 in a frank upstanding fight, the creation of a 
 mutual respect, for out of evil cometh good. 
 When men meet, in the presence of Provi- 
 dence, they do not part as they met ; a new 
 relationship has sprung up. Formal enemies, 
 being thrown together on the knees of the 
 gods, may then begin a friendship. 
 
 Beautiful and becoming are such friend- 
 ships. They thrive on some common 
 element of nature, and royal here is the 
 love towards little children. " I thought of 
 you and the little ones," a tender-hearted 
 Atkins tells his wife about a hand-to-hand 
 fight with an opponent. He does so in 
 explanation of the manner in which it 
 closes : " He praved for mercy, and told me 
 he had four little children at home." The 
 thoughts of Atkins also fly home ; he has 
 
 200
 
 One Touch of Nature 
 
 fought daggers, but mingled tears are the 
 outcome. 
 
 " How is my little Kitty ? My love to 
 her and to you." The letter is short, for 
 the " fall-in " has sounded, but it is all com- 
 plete, and sweet as an idyll. The other 
 camp has the same tender breath of affection 
 in a letter to " My dear Otto," a small 
 fellow, though he is at the front. His big 
 sister, who mothers the family, is anxious to 
 visit him, " Only I suppose you could hardly 
 find a place free from draught for baby ! " 
 
 Oversea comes the same kingly prattle to 
 a Welshman, as we discern in his self-com- 
 muning, " I am thinking of the children 
 every day and every night." Are they 
 growing into girlhood or boyhood ? Then 
 so much the dearer are they. A Boer enters 
 the British lines, thus giving himself up a 
 prisoner, in order that he may be with his 
 boy, who has been wounded and left on the 
 field. A company of Corn walls have a 
 string of prisoners in charge, among them a 
 bright, comely lad of twelve. He has been 
 in the wars, shouldering a rifle, and has been 
 
 201
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 shot In the legs. " Very pathetic," says one 
 of the Cornwalls, " but you bet we are look- 
 ing after him ! " 
 
 " Give my love to the children and 
 acquaintances," a Dutch woman charges her 
 husband who is in laager, and who later 
 finds a grave on the veldt. " My dear 
 husband," the letter runs on in tears, " I 
 hope to meet you again on earth, and if not, 
 then in heaven," She finishes with the pen, 
 as her own expression is, but not with the 
 heart. Not less sad is the tragedy of a 
 British soldier of the reserve, who on his 
 marriage-day had received orders to join the 
 colours. Marriage, and married life, are 
 measured in hours for him, since he is to 
 meet death in a bayonet-charge. The sweet- 
 heart he made wife, and was torn from, is 
 quickly robbed of her orange blossom and 
 given crape. 
 
 There is winning drama in the story of 
 how a Boer farmer comes between a little 
 English girl and the fangs of a snake. Two 
 soldiers have him under escort, he being a 
 prisoner, and they are passing the child at 
 
 202
 
 One Touch of Nature 
 
 play on the road. She stoops to pick, up 
 what, at a first glance, appears to be a stick. 
 With a cry of warning the Boer leaps from 
 between his escort, and in a moment has his 
 heel on the head of a wriggling snake. He 
 soothes and kisses the frightened child, and 
 turns to the soldiers with the apology, " She 
 was just like my own leedle girl." They are 
 his guard of honour for the rest of the 
 journey. They swing along, carrying his 
 humble bundle of baggage, now on one rifle- 
 barrel, slung shoulder-high, now on the 
 other. Nothing is too good for him. 
 
 " To my dear little son," a Dutch mother 
 pours out her heart, in a long letter signed, 
 " Your Never-Forgetting Mother." Its 
 language is the language of all mothers 
 who have sons in the precincts of risk and 
 danger. And all those sons will read in 
 reverence — the reverence of each son for his 
 own mother — the story of motherly affec- 
 tion which we have in these passages : 
 
 " Oh, Davie ! it seems as if you and your 
 father had been away a year. I weary much 
 and cannot endure it any longer, and I 
 203
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 tremble when I read that the guns may shoot 
 you. But, my child, I believe that God will 
 preserve us and bring us together again. 
 Oh, my child ! I have no rest here — I only 
 wish to get away to you. At one time I got 
 as far as the station, when I had to turn 
 back." 
 
 She is met by the iron regulations which 
 possess a country in time of war, and 
 even a mother cannot thrust them aside. 
 But within them there is room for the good 
 deed, the kind act ; for the exercise of that 
 charity which, happily, belongs to mankind. 
 " Don't believe in hitting a man that's dov/n," 
 observes a C.I.V. of a prisoner who, from a 
 passing railway truck, has asked for a drink 
 of water ; " so I passed him my water-bottle, 
 and tears came into his eyes when he said, 
 ' Tank you ; it vas good.' " 
 
 The service is returned when the Boers 
 bring fruit to a relay of soldiers engaged in 
 the burial of the dead. Even it is returned 
 direct to a C.I.V. , for we have one telling us 
 how well he fares at a Dutch farmhouse. 
 He is given eggs and bread, all for nothing, 
 204
 
 One Touch of Nature 
 
 but insists on leaving his own pipe, his knife, 
 nay, a lucky sixpence — his whole fortune — 
 with the family, as keepsakes. The veldt 
 burns so hot in the sun that you cannot, with 
 the bare hand, pick a vagrant knife from it, 
 but hearts keep green and unscotched. 
 
 A Borderer and a Dutchman strike up a 
 strange acquaintance across the Tugela. The 
 Borderer goes to one bank to draw water for 
 the poor fellows with wounds and parched 
 lips. From the other bank a watchful Boer 
 shows his Mauser and threatens to shoot. 
 The Borderer waves a handkerchief, explains 
 his mission, and all is mercy and peace. It 
 might almost be the meeting, after a stiff 
 battle, of two brothers who are from Lan- 
 cashire. Each has thought the other dead, 
 and the youngest sits crying as the eldest 
 stumbles upon him. " You can guess the 
 hand-shake we exchanged " ; and indeed you 
 can. Nobody is looking at them. 
 
 Of two brothers in another regiment one 
 
 is taken and the other left, and so with 
 
 friends who are brothers in all but blood. 
 
 " Ged away. Bob," the first advises in his 
 
 205
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 hearty Lancashire, " before tha gets hit 
 again." " Nod I," answers the wounded 
 comrade. " Aw'm no'd leavin' thee, Jem." 
 Yet he does, for a bullet runs through his 
 head, and he has not even time to mutter a 
 prayer. But what he has said is a noble 
 prayer. 
 
 A lance-corporal of the Royal Fusiliers 
 conjures up for us a wonderful watch-service. 
 He and his comrades observe the Boers at 
 their evening prayer-meeting, and, not to be 
 outdone, themselves start singing hymns. 
 " We had sung a grand old English hymn 
 when one of the enemy advanced to within 
 forty yards and asked us to sing it over 
 again. It reminded him of his home, he 
 said, and we concluded that he was British 
 born. We sang it again." The return for 
 this is a trifle, yet much to the soldier man. 
 A dragoon has his horse shot under him, is 
 made prisoner, and his captor is taking away 
 his pipe with the other poor loot. " What 
 are you doing .? " a Boer chief snaps out. 
 "You mustn't take his pipe — he won't be 
 able to smoke." 
 
 206
 
 One Touch of Nature 
 
 Whoever captures, or is captured, the 
 resulting picture is sure to be intimate and 
 human. " Every prisoner I came across," a 
 soldier reports, " had a religious tract in his 
 pocket." That is spiritual food. 
 
 A supply of bully-beef and bread is set 
 before a bedraggled, famished commando of 
 Boers who have been escorted into some 
 camp. " Didn't they shake it," ready 
 Atkins says of the food ; " their best feed 
 for many a long day." 
 
 We are reminded of a colonial who is 
 asked by a regular, " Have you any scoff.''" 
 " No, none of the Government's ; only my 
 own." Next the regular asks, " Have you 
 any bread .'' " " Bread ! What do you 
 mean .'' What's bread .'' What does it taste 
 like ? " " Oh," laughs the regular, " I've 
 just got a loaf, and here's half for you." 
 The faring tendered to a colonial will as 
 readily be extended to a Boer, and a word 
 added for sauce. 
 
 It is the sort of piquant sauce of which 
 Atkins has an immense supply. Thus, a 
 Highlander is happened upon, passing a crust 
 207
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 and the news of the campaign with a Boer. 
 " Tired of it, are you ? " exclaims the High- 
 lander ; " why, you have only been fighting 
 our advance guard yet." You should have 
 seen his lip drop ! Such is badinage of the 
 Atkins brand. 
 
 Discipline and courage ! These a Gordon 
 Highlander blandly informs a curious Dutch- 
 man are what capture kopjes ; and as for 
 the Dutchman, we learn that he is proud to 
 be taken prisoner by one of the world-famed 
 Gordons ! Everybody is satisfied ; all is 
 well. A second Gordon communicates the 
 views of a second Boer also upon the Gordon 
 men. " The ' kilties ' are devils to fight." 
 Their fury in the charge, their contempt of 
 death are diabolical, and rough is the day's 
 settling. 
 
 But there is no enmity in all this ; it 
 eventually takes us to the hand grip, and the 
 exchange of plug tobacco. When the flare 
 of the combat has died down, goodwill dwells 
 with the combatants. Britons and Boers 
 meet at the burial of the slain, and have a 
 dolorous, consoling talk when that task is 
 208
 
 One Touch of Nature 
 
 finished. Perhaps there is a piano in a house 
 near by, and somebody plays " Home Sweet 
 Home," in slow time. 
 
 " Very decent fellows, treated us very 
 well," so Atkins jerks out, disturbing the 
 music. " They were very good about water," 
 we have the record in another letter, *' giving 
 us all they had, and fetching more from the 
 bottom of the hill, a mile and a half away." 
 " We call them Boers," remarks a Northum- 
 berland Fusilier, " but they are anything but 
 Boors." 
 
 "Since we have been with them," says a 
 man who has been captured, " we have had 
 almost any mortal thing except liberty." 
 Those who wrestle on the veldt regard each 
 other handsomely, and are slow to wrath and 
 to the bitter word, knowing better. "We 
 are brothers, we are men," they sing in the 
 South, as is sung of "Nelson and the North." 
 Grateful is the thought beside the ghastly 
 machine of war ; it helps to stanch the 
 wounds. 
 
 " Our fellows," a linesman sets down, 
 " treat the Boer wounded as if they were our 
 209 P
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 own, and some of the Boers are much 
 touched. I have seen us offer them our last 
 drop of water, though we knew not where 
 to find any more." A Highlander and a 
 Boer are lying side by side, the former some- 
 what hurt, the latter badly. The Boer makes 
 a sign, as if desiring a drink, and the High- 
 lander hands him his flask, apologising that 
 it contains nothing better than brackish 
 water. A Hollander, with a bullet in his 
 shoulder, is brought back to consciousness 
 by a pull at an enemy's whisky flask. Next 
 the friendly enemy digs out the bullet with 
 his knife, and ties up the wound with a 
 handkerchief. 
 
 The instances of good-fellov/ship are end- 
 less. " Would you like something to 
 drink.'*" a Boer asks a Gordon. Both have 
 been smitten in the fray. " What have you 
 got ? " "A bottle of port wine." Each has 
 a pull at it. " Now," continues the Gordon, 
 "would you like something to eat.'*" 
 " What have you got ? " " A loaf of 
 bread." " My goodness," says the Boer, 
 " I haven't tasted bread for weeks." The 
 
 2IO
 
 One Touch of Nature 
 
 stretcher-bearers find them at this com- 
 munion, and almost hesitate to break in 
 upon it. 
 
 A rifleman has a simple story of how, 
 being already wounded, he is saved from 
 annihilation. A brawny Boer, " fightin' 
 mad," is girding at him, when a younger 
 Boer interferes. The Berserk who wants 
 fight, goes elsewhere to get it, and this is 
 what follows for the rifleman : — 
 
 " The young Boer helped me up, and as 
 the fall, and a bullet in the foot, had taken it 
 all out of me, he propped me against a rock 
 and gave me some water. Then he said, in 
 very broken English, ' I save your life, do 
 you know ? ' I nodded. He went on, 
 ' You know why I save your life .^ ' I 
 shook my head. He answered, ' Because 
 you are like my brother.' He gave me a 
 cigar, carried me on his back down the hill 
 to near our camp, said ' They find you all 
 right here,' shook my hand and bolted." 
 
 The practice of these good ofiices is not 
 one-sided. The kind heart and the grateful 
 one know not race distinction. " When I 
 
 211
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 had emptied my bottle between a couple of 
 wounded Boers," a private writes of Belmont, 
 " a third one, a big chap about forty, rushed 
 towards me and held out his hand, which I 
 shook heartily. He did not speak a word, but I 
 could see his lips quiver, and there were tears 
 in his eyes." A member of the Medical Staff 
 Corps comes upon a wounded Boer who is 
 dying. There is little to be done, but 
 *' I put him in the shade, injected some 
 morphia into his arm to ease the pain, and 
 gave him some water." 
 
 Perhaps it is to this poor fellow that his 
 wife has written, " Dear husband, you must 
 promise me that if you are taken ill, you will 
 come home at once. You must not be ill 
 away from me." Unhappily, her empty 
 house is to remain empty, and only a distant 
 grave is to be filled. Yet there are touches 
 of sombre comfort on its black edge, as take 
 these further witnesses ; — 
 
 " The Boers sang a hymn over the grave, 
 and then shook hands with us before we 
 parted." 
 
 " After the chaplain had read the burial 
 
 212
 
 One Touch of Nature 
 
 service, a Boer who was standing by said, ' I 
 hope you will have better luck next time.* 
 We were too full of sorrow to reply." 
 
 " They helped us to dig the graves and to 
 carry our dead, and one Boer stepped out 
 and said a short prayer, hoping the war would 
 soon end ; and while we stood with heads 
 uncovered they sang a hymn in Dutch. It 
 cut our fellows up very much ; in fact we 
 could hardly speak for some time." 
 
 The graveside is the final, the all-conquer- 
 ing touch of Nature, but the morrow arrives 
 with its calls, its duties, perhaps its laughter. 
 Mostly, in the world, laughter overtakes 
 sorrow, a well-ordered plan. But a rough- 
 and-ready Lancashire soldier has no thought 
 of making mirth when, as the shells rain at 
 Kimberley, he addresses an eminent civilian, 
 " Douk the nut, tha bloomin' fool." More 
 deliberate is the message of a Boer signaller 
 to the British, " A happy New Year to you," 
 and the reply, " The same to you, and we'll 
 add the compliments of the season when we 
 meet." 
 
 Ah, what tales are told us ! Actually we 
 213
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 get a romance of a bar of soap which is 
 greatly coveted by a soldier, who has not 
 known soap for months. A buxom Dutch 
 girl with, perhaps, a more rightful claim to 
 the soap, lays a hand upon it. " All right, 
 my dear," says Atkins, " you need it." She 
 gets angry ; so he adds, the rascal, but we 
 know there has been no such incident. 
 Simply it is a yarn circulated for the sake of 
 the retort, thought to be so clever. Atkins 
 will have his joke out, having once got it into 
 his head, even if he should wreck his reputa- 
 tion for chivalry. He has the common failing 
 for small wit. 
 
 Then there is excellent vain-glory in the 
 elaborate tale of a scout, about a visit he pays 
 to a farmhouse. He has orders to take the 
 farmer away, a prisoner, but the *' old man " 
 has daughters who coax and cajole and weep 
 in turn. "It was awfully nice," we are 
 assured, " to have three plump Dutch girls 
 kissing me, and I believe I should have given 
 their father a chance. But when the old 
 woman wanted to help the girls in the 
 kissing, I got hard-hearted, and yanked the 
 214
 
 One Touch of Nature 
 
 old fellow off to the town." There is a fine 
 detail here, but somehow it does not convince. 
 It is limelight. 
 
 Atkins, being a natural fellow, is least 
 convincing when he tries to be most so ; a 
 characteristic of some men and most women. 
 
 215
 
 XII.—*' THE MEN ARE SPLENDID ! " 
 
 Some points in illustration of this, with general observations 
 on Thomas Atkins, a man of parts. 
 
 A MAN," says Carlyle, "shall and must 
 be valiant ; he must march forward 
 and quit himself like a man, trusting imper- 
 turbably in the appointment and choice of the 
 upper Powers, and, on the whole, not fear at 
 all." 
 
 The spirit of this marching order directs, 
 in no small measure, the every-day war life 
 of the common soldier. He seeks to know 
 his duty, let who will have the setting of it 
 before him, and then he seeks to do it. 
 " Oh," he says to himself, " that's the job, 
 is it .? Well, here goes," He has the inner 
 faith, which is the dowry of sound manhood, 
 and by it he walks. If the road takes him 
 216
 
 " The Men are Spi.endiu." — Tlie incident here shown ivas probably 
 the inspiration of the phrase. At Colenso all the gunners of a ft/teen- 
 pounder are shot, sai'C two, who still keep loading; and firing. They 
 use up the emergency rounds o/ case, and, when nothing more can be 
 done, stand to the ""fentioti," and die as heroes should,
 
 '^ The Men are Splendid ! " 
 
 "over the hills and far away," he will return 
 when he can. 
 
 The soldier may be likened to a young 
 oak, in that he stands stubbornly to the 
 blasts, without crying the fact across the 
 forest. The tree of knowledge, lifting its 
 wealth of branches overhead, shakes and 
 thunders in every breeze, a veritable monitor. 
 " Hullo, old fellow," the pert, sinewy sapling 
 looks up, " don't make such a row about it 
 all. You'll be having a fall if you don't 
 mind." That is Atkins, delivering himself 
 of a parable for all whom it may concern. 
 He is sharp of insight, if he be a townsman ; 
 not scarce of mother wisdom and long, slow 
 views, if he be from the country. In either 
 case he has the straps and pipe-clay of old 
 custom to overcome. The wonder is that he 
 does so well, this raw Samson of ours ; only 
 he has rare natural qualities. 
 
 The one that shines pre-eminent in the 
 self-revelation of his epistles, is his cheeriness, 
 his indomitable cheeriness of heart. He 
 bubbles over with animal spirits ; he is 
 resolved to make the best of all things. He 
 217
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 dwells in the glow of mirth, playfulness, 
 fooling, call it what you will, which is bred 
 of healthy spirits. The merry heart carries 
 him all the day, over the veldt, up the kopje 
 and down again, or through the rock-strewn 
 kloof, when, without it, he would be tired in 
 a mile. He looks steadily into the bright 
 face of the sun, forgetful of the heat which 
 blisters his own. 
 
 This cheerfulness maintains him against 
 troubles small or great, even if it must take 
 a sardonic turn. " The times are hard," a 
 soldier writes, " but it's a poor month in 
 which we don't have one or two ' beanos ' 
 wherewith to mark our respective birthdays." 
 Here is the thrusting of trouble aside, the 
 getting away from it, as a balloon rises into a 
 serene sky. But another time that is not 
 possible, and then a mocking philosophy, 
 making molehills of mountains, is trained 
 upon the difficulties. Suffering, peril, cala- 
 mity, are met in the gate, with a joke or a 
 jibe, the overcoming spirit indeed. Only let 
 us find Atkins in one of those humours of 
 splendid indifference to whatever may befall 
 
 him. 
 
 218
 
 " The Men are Splendid ! " 
 
 A troop of lancers stand beside their 
 horses, under a dripping sky, for a whole 
 night, and in the morning they carol, " Oh, 
 why left I my home ! " They have it out 
 with the weather, and as we see time after 
 time, one of the deadliest moods of Atkins 
 is when he becomes satirical. A number of 
 infantrymen are selected to escort a big gun, 
 a duty carrying special risks, because the gun 
 is a target tempting the enemy's fire. They 
 think hard for a minute on learning their 
 commission, and then raise their voices in 
 chorus, " Now we shan't be long ! " Off 
 they march, to that good-bye from their 
 comrades ; it covers any display of the 
 emotions. " Two deep, men ! " shouts an 
 officer, as the crossing of the bullet-churned 
 Tugela is about to be attempted, and back 
 comes the answer, " Bedad, an' it's too deep 
 I am already ! " 
 
 These light airs sail Atkins prosperously 
 along, when a craft less buoyant than his 
 would founder in the storms of warfare. He 
 puflFs and blows at his mast-head lights, 
 keeping them ever clear and bright, to lead 
 219
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 him on. The greater the gloom, the more 
 he searches for the gleam : 
 
 " Keep Thou my feet ; I do not ask to see 
 The distant scene, — one step enough for me." 
 
 Nor does it fail him. We understand that 
 by his stoical endurance on the march, his 
 sure advance against a rain of lead, his urgent 
 dash in the charge. These are traditional 
 qualities, and they meet in a tenacity of pur- 
 pose which suggests the flowing tide of 
 the sea, with some of its awesome violence. 
 Atkins springs forward with a supple foot 
 and puts it down heavily. 
 
 We have the first characteristic in the story 
 of a bugler boy who packs his bugle out of 
 sight, gets hold of a rifle, and hies him to the 
 fighting line. There he is detected in his 
 villainy, that of being still a boy, and turned 
 back, but he appeals to the colonel, who says, 
 " Well, he's a strong, willing lad, let him 
 alone. He can get his bugle when it's over." 
 And we have the second characteristic, the 
 obstinate grip-and-growl, in the lamentations 
 which rise from Atkins when he is ordered to 
 retire from the impossible. 
 
 220
 
 " The Men are Splendid ! " 
 
 " The order came to retire," he tells us, 
 *' so back we had to come. As soon as they 
 said ' Retire,' our hearts went — we were done 
 up. While advancing we did not notice 
 thirst, or distance, or tired limbs, but as we 
 were marched back, and knew we were beaten, 
 we felt it all. We just strolled off, being for 
 one thing dead tired ; some praying for a 
 bullet to end their misery." 
 
 It is the valley of the shadow, but the 
 soldier loves not to linger there, and we soon 
 have him again on the heights Self-respect, 
 pride in his uniform, regard for the fame of 
 his regiment, all help him up the mountain 
 side. There he climbs, sure-footed, with 
 his colonial comrades, whom he delights to 
 take under his wing, coo-oo-ing to them in 
 zestful regard. He approves himself as the 
 godfather of those young giants from oversea, 
 and he has a gracious eye for them. " Bust 
 me, mates," he exclaims when they wade 
 through a fusillade, to the cracked music of a 
 stray concertina — " bust me, mates, them 
 blokes don't know what fear is ! " 
 
 How touched we are to find ourselves, our 
 
 221
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 qualities, even our defects, reflected in a 
 young kinsman ! But we like him to be one 
 or two degrees removed, not to be, as it were, 
 a possible rival in the household. He must 
 be viewed with space about him, or we miss 
 the attractive curves and fasten upon the 
 harsh angles. Atkins reminds us of this. 
 He is even inclined, for a time, to be jealous 
 of the volunteer from the Old Country, think- 
 ing him a hothouse soldier, the spoiled darling 
 of the man in the street. 
 
 " Did you ever hear such a thing V says a 
 regular about a visit to a camp of newly- 
 arrived volunteers : " we two regulars ordered 
 away, when we called to shake hands with an 
 old acquaintance ! The sentry wasn't to 
 blame, of course, having his orders, but what 
 a pity some of them volunteers don't bring a 
 glass case out with them, for there's a lot of 
 dust about here." 
 
 Hotly sarcastic, a sure master of the barbed 
 word, is Atkins on occasion, but the warrior- 
 born volunteers of the homeland are soon 
 taken to his heart. He and they squeeze 
 behind some insufficient stone, on a plain 
 
 222
 
 " The Men are Splendid ! " 
 
 where the dust is leaping up in little spouts 
 and he is jealous no more. There is no room 
 for jealousy then, " What's the text for to- 
 day ? " A regular asks the question, and a 
 volunteer draws forth a dog-eared volume, 
 consults it, and reads, " I will be with him in 
 trouble and deliver him." The words are 
 comforting, for religion and resolution meet 
 in the soldier, though he does not speak much 
 of either. 
 
 His tongue may babble loose words, or 
 worse, flinging back at the world what the 
 world has taught him ; but deep in his heart 
 there is the reverence which betokens innate 
 religious feeling. He does not call it that, 
 even if he knows of its existence, yet it peeps 
 out in a score of ways. A bullet, well aimed 
 at a sergeant, is stopped by a New Testament 
 that he carries in the breast-pocket of his 
 tunic. The talk of the camp that night is 
 only of one thing, and there are pauses 
 during which the soldiers stare into the 
 embers of the fire. 
 
 Usually the camp-fire talk is of all things 
 that have happened in the day, with excur- 
 223
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 sions Into what should have happened. 
 Atkins is keen on strategy and tactics, and 
 he expresses his criticism or praise in the 
 manner of his particular people. Is he 
 English } Then with a deft candour, a 
 clear, gliding wit, which at once engage 
 sympathy. Is he Scots ? With a quick 
 analysis, a thrust of reticent, reflective 
 humour, or, if he be a Highlander, with an 
 appeal to sentiment and the imagination. 
 Is he an Irishman ? He puts wisdom into a 
 cap and bells, and is amazed when they get 
 all the attention. 
 
 War emphasises race peculiarities. It 
 also makes us familiar with the individual 
 loyalty of the soldier towards his immediate 
 officers. His captain, his colonel, his 
 general — he will stand up for them valiantly 
 against all other captains, colonels, and 
 generals, especially if they see that he is 
 well fed. He holds fervently that an empty 
 stomach is neither magnificent, nor war. 
 He likes his little comforts, and towards 
 those in high places who will have a care for 
 them, he is grateful and he will repay. 
 224
 
 " The Men are Splendid ! " 
 
 Now, think of the joy which will possess 
 a corps whose colonel emerges triumphant 
 from a difficult passage with some general 
 officer, his over-lord ! The colonel has 
 fallen upon an empty house and finds it cosy 
 quarters ; but the general officer command- 
 ing is fain to disturb him. One day the 
 colonel gets the message, " G.O.C. wants 
 your house." He is smitten with a similar 
 desire to save words, and replies " G.O.C. 
 can G.T.H." He is called upon to explain 
 his contractions. That is very simple — 
 " General Officer Commanding can Get The 
 House." The corps chortles for a week. 
 
 The story may not show Atkins as alto- 
 gether equal to the command, " When the 
 host goeth forth against thine enemies, then 
 keep thee from every wicked thing." He is 
 very, very human. But he is earnest to do 
 the right according to his lights, and in so 
 far as he falls short of it, he recognises that 
 he is the loser. Still, frank shortcomings 
 are often strands in the loves and friendships 
 that warm the world. Perfection, since it 
 needs nothing itself, has no channel by which 
 225 Q
 
 The Epistles of Atkins 
 
 it can give others anything, and so it is cold. 
 Now coldness is the last sin to be charged 
 against Atkins, for is he not in the furnace 
 of war ? Where its roaring heat does not 
 burn, it may purify, turning dross into gold. 
 
 " If war brings out the brutal instincts," 
 a reflective soldier writes, " it reveals the 
 Godlike also, for I have come across scores 
 of instances of sacrifice, even unto death, 
 among men who in times of peace are looked 
 upon as almost worthless characters." 
 
 The book of human life is not plainer to 
 us, amid the jangle of war, than it is at other 
 times. Its secrets are not on the covers for 
 the first eye to read, and to ask how war 
 influences individual character, is to demand 
 the scrolls of eternity. We merely have 
 glimpses of stray pages, as they flutter for a 
 minute in the winds of battle, and then are 
 closed ; but not until they have flung golden 
 lights upon the black pall of war. That has 
 been clear as we have followed the thoughts 
 of the soldier, and seen him in his relations 
 with friend and foe. He acts the man 
 towards both, giving kindness and receiving 
 226
 
 ^^ The Men are Splendid ! " 
 
 it, by the door of a simple heart. The little 
 children of two races declare it when they 
 turn him into a delighted school-boy, and 
 make toys of his savage weapons. With 
 easy confidence they dethrone the god of 
 war, who smiles contentment, as well he may. 
 Only those in whom there dwelleth some 
 good may thus win the confidence of a child. 
 No light could be a safer guide to the 
 common soldier in the strange tangle of 
 feeling, experience, thought, with which war 
 invests him. His sensations link this world 
 with the next, the known with the unknown. 
 Much we can perceive, not all. Yonder is 
 the sky-line.
 
 "Cbe Orcsbain iprcss, 
 
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 WOKING AND LOXDOX.
 
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