a thousand yards from the edge of the changeful Atlantic through Swakopmund’s deep sandy streets and you get the key to the town.  For it ceases utterly, abruptly; from the door of its last villa, fitted with perfect furnishings from Hamburg, the bitter desolation that is the Namib Desert stretches away from your, very feet.  Marvelling at this place, I was particularly struck by the size of its cemetery.  But I was not long puzzled.  If you strike Swakopmund on a fine sunshiny day you will be pretty favourably impressed with the climate; it seems warm and temperate, and the sun sparkles on the sea.

In a week or so you will learn to modify that judgment.  More than half the days we were at Swakopmund a heavy pall of dampness hung over the place, and after a day or two of it one’s system seemed to be badly affected.  Maybe we were not acclimatised, but the fact remains that a very large proportion of us were down with a kind of dysentery, attended by vomiting and violent pains in the stomach.  Then there are days when the winds blow from the desert—­an indescribable experience.  They bring moths and flies with them, and great clouds of sand; it is a genuine labour to breathe, and at noon and for two hours after the temperature in the sun runs up into the “hundred-and-sixties.”  Swakopmund is not a health resort; or perhaps we dwelt there in the wrong season.  But it is a monument to Teutonic determination.  The Germans willed this town there, planted it on the edge of the wilderness; fitted it out, from bioscope theatre to church with organ and electric organola; and they lived in it, with the climate of perdition and all the accessories of a suburb of Berlin, and called it a seaport.  It is not a seaport; in a fair gale you can’t land a barrel of corks at the pier.  But given time and they would have built in the face of nature a two million pounds breakwater and everything complete.  Yes, they are a thorough people; they are human ants as regards work.  Nevertheless, it is not colonising.  The Germans are not colonists.

Army Headquarters were fixed at the Damaraland Building close to the shore—­a splendidly equipped edifice, with a tower commanding a fifteen-mile-radius view of the desert and the sea.  General Botha made the private quarters of the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief at the Woermann Line House close by.

When we arrived at the northern seaport it had been in our possession many weeks, but our troops were occupying the trenches just outside the town, and from the Damaralands Building Tower our look-out and signallers could see through the heat-haze the enemy’s patrols moving to and fro in the glistening sands beyond.