someone else. Altogether they put some 700 shells into the camp while we stayed there, and did on the whole extraordinarily little damage. The camp contained a motor-lorry park, several batteries of artillery, a biggish supply depot, and a great many animals so that, on the whole, we may consider ourselves to have been fortunate. Thank Heaven they had no shrapnel.

One rather humiliating feature in the situation was that to this continual and vexatious bombardment we were unable to make any reply, except when it pleased the aeroplanes to come over and drop a few bombs. None of our guns were of sufficient range to get at the mountain positions, so that when the shelling began we had to scuttle to our holes and lie doggo till it was over; a sad change for our victorious army.

My mess associates, in spite of their exalted rank, were exceedingly pleasant companions, and with the Colonel in particular, once my natural awe had subsided a little, I spent many pleasant hours in reconstructing poems from memory. We managed between us to do a good many of Wordsworth's sonnets, the greater part of the "Spanish Armada" (I am looking forward to the time when I can fill up the hiatuses), and other masterpieces of literature. The Colonel was, besides, a magnificent raconteur, and enlivened our numerous and compulsory sojourns underground with selections from his extensive repertoire. He was, I believe, the author of the famous-at least it ought to be famous-description of a certain important commercial center as the "City of Dreadful Knights." The intelligent reader will judge from this that our hours in the dungeon were not by any means as dull as they might appear to have been.

The situation was besides not without its milder humors. There was the enthusiastic young R. A. M. C. of

ficer who insisted on holding an inspection of latrines while a particularly furious strafe was in progress. There were the comments of one of the regimental humorists, who from an adjoining dugout poured forth a stream of satire, not very subtle, perhaps, but refreshing under the circumstances. There were the regimental monkey's unavailing efforts to take cover behind a tent pole. But, on the whole, the rank and file found it worrying; the guns even when they did no damage made a horrid noise, and there was always the humiliating fact that we could make no adequate reply. The aeroplanes only came at intervals of a few days, and there were generally only two or three and they could not drop very many bombs. I am told that the Germans had the most wonderful underground places of refuge to which they could retire, and I don't suppose it did them much harm beyond frightening their Askaris, who were terrified by the birds who laid the explosive eggs. In German West the enemy had been well supplied with aeroplanes, but here they had none at all.

Speculation was of course rife as to how the situation would develop, and plans for storming the position were often discussed. But it was a very strong position indeed, and certainly could not be taken without considerable loss of life. When you have been in camp a certain time it always feelsat least it does to me-as though it were going to last forever, and it gave me quite a shock when, on waking up one morning, I heard the Colonel giving directions for moving the regiment that day. Shell Camp and the life there to which we had grown so accustomed suddenly stopped short.

It very soon leaked out that we were not going forward but going back, and the difficulty immediately ahead was that of getting out of the camp. As I have said, there was a river at the back

to be crossed, and this river with its bridge was within range of the German guns. Fortunately for us it was a very misty day, and the observation post which the enemy had established on one of the highest points of the mountain range was out of action. This is probably the explanation of our good luck in getting away without a shot being fired. It was very good luck indeed, for the whole brigade moved out with their transport in wagons, each drawn by ten mules, and forming an excellent target. Probably owing to the thickness of the weather the midday strafe was omitted for once, though in the evening it began again as usual. But by that time of course the whole column was well on its way, not a little cheered by the ineffectual barking of Conny in the distance.

This day of leaving Shell Camp was memorable to me for another reasonit was the day on which I was introduced to my dear and faithful friend Mary Abyssinia. Though in the pride of my heart I twice rejected her for nobler equine mounts (she was a mule, by the way, or rather a jennet), I always had to come back to Mary, and she never once failed me. She had only once in her long career of usefulness shown any temper, and that was when the Transport officer to whom she then belonged had touched her with his spurs. That was too much for Mary, conscious as she must have been of the rectitude of her intentions, and she promptly ejected him in front of the whole regiment. She could canter like a rocking-chair and trot quite a comfortable trot, and her walk was the gliding of a billiard ball over a good table. She was beautiful as she was good, a little inclined to embonpoint, but that is an advantage on trek. Everybody loved Mary and envied her owner, as well they might. While horses were falling sick and dying by

the dozen, Mary flourished like a green bay tree, which may have been due to her habit of taking refreshment on every possible occasion. In the pauses of climbing the very stiffest mountains, Mary would manage to snatch a snack. She had been a sort of ecclesiastical institution since the transport discarded her, and I inherited her from my predecessor, the Scotch padre. I fear we shall never meet again, as circumstances entirely beyond my control obliged me, after months of journeying together and

many adventures, to leave her behind when we moved to a new scene of operations. There was a great deal of competition as to who should get her, and in the end the prize fell to a young Intelligence officer who promised me to love and cherish her. I miss her sadly and never more so than at the moment of writing, when I am faced by the prospect of a ninety-mile trek over mountains and on my own two feet.

We outspanned at nightfall, still little more than a mile from our starting point, and made ourselves as comfortable as we could by the roadside. We managed to raise one blanket and one waterproof sheet between us, and with our saddles for pillows were fairly snug. It was the first time I had slept on the ground in East Africa, for up till now I had always had my camp bed, and I was greatly exercised in mind at the thought of snakes. A few days before, at Shell Camp, we had had a nocturnal visit from a python, which went crawling over the dugouts and giving the men a creepy experience. Those that saw it described it as of enormous size, but in the darkness it escaped unharmed. My companion treated my fears in a very frivolous spirit, and to soothe me (I suppose) sang from beneath our common blanket a number of amorous ballads, for besides being a quartermaster and an engineer he was a vocalist of great

power and perseverance. I thought it very imprudent, for snakes are notoriously fond of music, and there must have been plenty of them in the ground behind us, and I felt very uneasy, as he went on warbling that he lost his heart in loveland, and other inappropriate sentiments. Still nothing untoward happened, though for a long time after the concert had ceased I lay listening fearfully for the dreaded rustle in the grass, and presently I went to sleep in spite of it.

Snakes had loomed very large in my imagination among the possible drawbacks to war in East Africa, for I have always had an unspeakable horror of the beastly things. In the event, however, I found they gave us little trouble, and I gradually fell into the prevalent fashion of ignoring their existence. I even slept once for a whole week in a banda with the knowledge that there was a snake in the wall of it. We only once caught sight of the creature and were never able to catch it, but at night we could hear it moving about distinctly. One of our officers claimed to be a snake-charmer, and caused a little sensation on one occasion by coming into the mess holding an enormous cobra by the tail. He was quite indignant with me when I asked him afterwards if he had killed it. He said nothing would induce him tɔ kill a snake under any circumstances, so that evidently there are points of view on the matter. I killed a snake myself, later on, but as it was a very, very small one I did not boast about it.

In no respect was the contrast between France and East Africa more striking than in the medical department. In France it is es near perfection as human ingenuity can make it. In my own case my wound was dressed and I was given the anti-tetanus injection within ten minutes of being hurt. I was taken to the Clearing Sta

LIVING AGE, VOL. VIII, No. 375.

tion that evening, and ten days later had been X-rayed and operated on at the Base Hospital. Bad cases were brought down by canal boat without even the jerking of a hospital train. The Base Hospital in my case was at Rouen, and the journey home to England was made by water the whole way, the hospital ships coming down the Seine.

Such perfection was, of course, impossible in East Africa, owing in the first place to the enormous length of the line of communication, and to the fact that it was largely made by motor transports over very bad roads. There were not enough motor ambulances to deal with the numbers of sick and wounded, and the journey had often enough to be made in open lorries exposed to the full glare of the sun. The jolting in a motor ambulance even was bad enough; the sufferings of the men in ordinary lorries were simply terrible. I do not suppose any one was to blame; the armies were moving forward so rapidly, the difficulties of transport were so immense, that it was quite likely impossible to get up the petrol necessary for an adequate fleet of ambulances. The base hospitals were all that such institutions should be, with adequate equipment and staffs of devoted nurses, but, at least at one period of the war, they were a long, long way from the front, so that it was impossible to send really bad cases back, and the clearing stations had, to a large extent, to do their work.

We have supped fairly full of horrors the last year or two, and I have no wish to add to them unnecessarily. But East Africa is a long way from England, and it is only right that the Mother Country should know a little at least of what her sons out here suffered. All field hospitals after an action are pretty bad, but here we had in addition the heat and the flies and the

under a line of low hills. But almost immediately the word was passed up that our rear-guard had struck a road mine. I went back at once and found a horrible state of things-a hole in the road, two men and a mule horribly mutilated, and several wounded. The doctors were doing their best with one of the wounded men, but the other was beyond their help, and died in my arms a few minutes after I got there. The other died within half an hour, and we buried them both in the same grave. They were two young South African Dutchmen, and I read over them such The Cornhill Magazine.

prayers as I thought we should use in common. . . We piled up as big a heap of stones as we could make, and the ambulance sergeant fixed a board with their names and numbers, and then we left them in a very lonely place. But some day, I take it, when the Great South Africa of which we dream is a reality, when the union of the races is complete, and the old accursed hatred all forgotten, someone from a greater Union will pass that way, and see and know, as we can but believe and guess, the meaning of that lonely grave among the hills.

R. G.

Man has been performing in all ages certain effective experiments with living things after the manner of the Man with the Muck-rake in Bunyan's parable. Intent upon immediate values and reaching them by empirical methods, while unaware of their hidden meaning, he has been the active agent in many experiments which have, on the one hand, fortified some existing doctrine, and, on the other, have led up to certain new discoveries. Such experiments as these are indirect, and not controlled by the exact and calculated rigor of modern direct experiments, which are the breath of life to science, but, such as they are, they stand out for us to interpret them. Here there is a necessary absence of any desire to prove a point, and whether their evidence be of small or great value, it is unimpeachable. They have needed the lifetime of many generations of men, and these died in ignorance of their value and "received not the promise." Few of the human agents employed were men of scientific mind, but they builded better than they knew, and some of them have demonstrated a truth which

happily called by Sir E. Ray Lankester the "insurgent son" of Nature, and he has fought a stubborn fight sometimes against and sometimes in alliance with the microscopic hosts of earth, air, and water, careless as Harry Smith of the Wynd of the deeper issues at stake, and his conquests have been not unlike those of the British race, who are said to have colonized a third of the globe in a fit of absence of mind. With what success he has handled for his own purposes these myriads of the infinitely little! How he has checked their