SECTION I

THE PRELIMINARY CANTER

At the stroke of seven on the evening of January 13, 1915, a train steamed out of Pretoria station to the accompaniment of roars of cheering.  And few in the imposing string of carriages that made the train were sober within the meaning of the act.  But everyone was in the highest spirits.  The Rebellion was over.  The New Year was with us.  After weary days our real business was on hand.  We were off to German West at last.

We reached Cape Town on the 15th.  I am particular about the date, not entirely as a result of a desire for meticulous accuracy.  All who started on the South-West Campaign will remember their Cape Peninsula experience after the heat and burden of the Rebellion.  The authorities might have chosen most of our camping grounds about Cape Town with the genial purpose of providing a kind of military holiday as a preliminary canter to the campaign proper.  The unit to which I was attached had its temporary resting place on the slopes of Table Mountain at Groote Schuur, on the Rhodes Estate.  And I fancy the world has on its vast surface few spots more alluring and more bracing to the spirit.

Up till that time South Africa itself had never put an expeditionary army, to be shipped by sea, on a war footing, and at Cape Town the work of equipping the South-West African Expeditionary Force was carried on and finished during the four weeks we were there.  The quiet pine and fir lined roads on the Rondebosch side of Table Mountain complained daily under the traffic of wagons and motors, horses, mules and guns; it ruined the roads and begot unceasing clouds of dust.

And from breakfast-time till late afternoon every street leading to Cape Town and to the great Supply and Ordnance Stores at Maitland and at Portswood Road was filled with grey and khaki carts and wagons roaring steadily along in golden dust.  In the whole Peninsula the normal interests of life were for the time being completely side-tracked.

Being associated directly with the Commander-in-Chief and Headquarters, we were fortunate in having our camp on the finest piece of ground on the estate; our tents stretched down a strip of sloping sward, sheltered from the wind by the wonderful trees that luxuriate on the lower falls of Table Mountain; from one’s tent entrance the eye was caught by a panorama sweeping a radius of twenty miles inland.  I shall never forget those days when in the morning wind and sun I helped to make out requisitions for shirts and breeches and saddlery to the notes of wood music; nor those nights when we lay in our blankets on the grass, stars swinging above, the town-lights winking away below us.  It is not often in life that one slips into dreamless slumber on soft grass, lullabied by the night-song of a south-wester in pine trees centuries old.