Kipling and war, p.17
Kipling and War, page 17
The kopje that copies its kind.
You can never be sure of your kopje,
But of this be you blooming well sure,
That a kopje is always a kopje,
And a Boojer is always a Boer!
[First published in The Five Nations (1903).]
* * *
This poem does not refer to anyone in particular, but again shows Kipling’s empathy with the courage and endurance of everyone under arms, even those fighting against the British.
Piet
(Regular of the Line)
I do not love my Empire’s foes,
Nor call ’em angels; still,
What is the sense of ’atin’ those
’Oom you are paid to kill?
So, barrin’ all that foreign lot
Which only joined for spite,
Myself, I’d just as soon as not
Respect the man I fight.
Ah there, Piet! – ’is trousies to ’is knees,
’Is coat-tails lyin’ level in the bullet-sprinkled breeze;
’E does not lose ’is rifle an’ ’e does not lose ’is seat,
I’ve known a lot o’ people ride a dam’ sight worse than Piet.
I’ve ’eard ’im cryin’ from the ground
Like Abel’s blood of old,
An’ skirmished out to look, an’ found
The beggar nearly cold.
I’ve waited on till ’e was dead
(Which couldn’t ’elp ’im much),
But many grateful things ’e’s said
To me for doin’ such.
Ah there, Piet! whose time ’as come to die,
’Is carcase past rebellion, but ’is eyes inquirin’ why.
Though dressed in stolen uniform with badge o’ rank complete,
I’ve known a lot o’ fellers go a dam’ sight worse than Piet.
An’ when there wasn’t aught to do
But camp and cattle-guards,
I’ve fought with ’im the ’ole day through
At fifteen ’undred yards;
Long afternoons o’ lyin’ still,
An’ ’earin’ as you lay
The bullets swish from ’ill to ’ill
Like scythes among the ’ay.
Ah there, Piet! – be’ind ’is stony kop.
With ’is Boer bread an’ biltong, an’ ’is flask of awful Dop;
’Is Mauser for amusement an’ ’is pony for retreat,
I’ve known a lot o’ fellers shoot a dam’ sight worse than Piet.
He’s shoved ’is rifle ’neath my nose
Before I’d time to think,
An’ borrowed all my Sunday clo’es
An’ sent me ’ome in pink.
[First published in The Five Nations (1903).]
* * *
After arriving in South Africa in February 1900, Kipling took a Red Cross ambulance train which travelled over 600 miles from the Cape to the Modder River to pick up casualties after the Battle of Paardeberg and back again.
With Number Three
A journey with a hospital train from Cape Town to the north during the South African War
April 1900
All the world over, nursing their scars,
Sit the poor fighting-men broke in our wars
Sit the poor fighting-men, surly and grim,
Mocking the lilt of the conquerors’ hymn.
Dust of the battle o’erwhelmed them and hid
Fame never found them for aught that they did.
Wounded and spent, to the lazar they drew,
Lining the road where the legions went through.
Sons of the Laurel, that press to your meed
Worthy God’s pity most ye that succeed
Ye that tread triumphing crowned toward the stars,
Pity poor fighting-men broke in our wars!
The sun had faded the Red Cross on her panels almost to brick colour; had warped her woodwork and blistered her paint. For three months she had jackalled behind the army – now at Belmont, now at Magersfontein, now at Rensburg, and in that time had carried over thirteen hundred sick and wounded. In her appointments, her doctors, her two Nursing Sisters, and her nineteen orderlies there was neither veneer nor pretence, coquetry of uniforms, nor the suspicion of official side. She was starkly set for the work in hand, her gear worn smooth by use and habit, detailed for certain business only, and to that business most strictly attending.
Since she started from no known platform I came aboard early, and while we lay silent as a ship in port, the big stock-pot purring in the kitchen, the bottles clicking in the pharmacy as the doctor counted them over, I felt that peace had never been in our generation – that Number Three Hospital Train – iodoform-scented, washed, scrubbed, and scoured – had plied since the beginning of time.
Know now that hospital trains have the right of way over all traffic, and since their crews feed aboard them, need only stop to water and change engines. We slipped out of Cape Town into the twilight at a steady twenty-five mile an hour on our six-hundred-mile journey North. Some day you in England will realise what it means to handle armies and their supplies over this distance on a single three-foot-six line. The war has been a war of shunting and side-tracking, of telegraphs and time-tables; so we may hope that the railway men, who have worked like devils, will not be overlooked when the decorations fall ripe.
Because the line runs through Cape Colony, and because Cape Colony is – we have the highest authority for it – loyally trying to be ‘neutral’, every bridge, every culvert, every point at which the line may be cut or blown up is guarded by a little detachment of armed men. These are drawn chiefly from local corps, such as the Duke of Edinburgh’s Own Volunteer Rifles. They do not like the work; they love still less the ‘loyalty’ which has made the fatigue necessary.
Said a dust-spotted, begrimed Sergeant of the ‘Duke’s’ as Number Three, double-headed, panted up the Hex River pass into the Karroo, ‘We’ve been here since November. I don’t mind telling you we’re pretty sick of it. We haven’t had a look-in at the Front yet. We sit here and patrol the line. Lovely work!’
The setting of the picture hardly varied a hair’s breadth. A single track, lifting and dancing in the heat, the brown, hairless hills dusted with split stones, the sleek mirages, the knots of khaki figures, the dingy tents, repeated themselves as though we were running in circles. Here was a water-tank. Number Three drank of it, sucking thirstily; here a speckle of tin houses and a refreshment-room, which we had no need to enter; here a new-laid siding. Number Three flung them all behind her; but for the men with rifles, the red-eyed, bristlebearded, disgusted track-watchers there was no escape.
Suddenly we overhauled a train-load of horses, Bhownagar’s and Jamnagar’s gifts to the war; stolid saises and a sowar or two in charge.
‘Whence dost thou come?’
‘From Bombay, with a Sahib.’ (The man looked like a Hyderabadi, but he had taken off most of his clothes.
‘Dost thou know the name of this land?’
‘No.’
‘Dost thou know whither thou goest?’
‘I do not know.’
‘What, then, dost thou do?’
‘I go with my Sahib.’
Great is the East, serene and immutable! We left them feeding and watering as the order was.
A few miles farther on – forty or fifty are of no account in this huge place – were guns, infantry, and buck-wagons, rumbling towards De Aar, and, I think, New South Wales Lancers. Then, a Victorian contingent camped by the wayside, happier than the ‘Duke’s’ because they were nearer the Front, but wrathful in that certain Canadians still farther up the line had had the audacity to make a camp called Maple Leaf. They wanted news of the Burma Military Police, long men on little fat ponies like clockwork mice, recently landed, and vanished. Corps have a knack of disappearing bodily in this country. Of the Burmans I knew nothing, but could furnish information more or less accurate of some Malay Light Horse lately seen in Cape Town, and of some Yeomanry details.
‘Ah,’ said Australia, with a rifle, by the water-tank, ‘wait till you see our Queensland bushmen. My word! They’re something.’
Then he expressed a private and unprintable opinion about those arrogant Canucks up the line, which opinion, twisted the other way, I got back again from a Canadian, an Eastern Province man, a few hours later.
Strictly in confidence, I may tell you that the Colonial Corps are riding just the least little bit in the world jealous. They have each the honour of a new country to uphold, and it is neck and neck between them. So I sat joyously on the rear platform while Number Three ran the links of Empire through my hands. English of the Midlands, Cockney, Scots, Irish, Welsh, Queenslander, Victorian, and Canadian, one after another, we picked them up and dropped them with a flying word.
There was nothing wrong with that chain, and by the same token, it seemed to have got hold of something at last, for a truckload of Boer prisoners slid by in charge of what looked like a few disreputable bearded veldt-cornets.
‘Ho!’ said an orderly critically. ‘And where did you pick them up?’
‘Round Paardeberg. There’s more to follow. Most of these is Transvaalers.’
‘That’s all right,’ said the orderly.
The Army, you see, is collecting Transvaalers, and has come a long way for samples. ‘An’ which might be prisoner and which is guard?’
Said the veldt-cornet with a battered helmet, ‘I’m a sergeant of Northamptons in charge.’
‘Oh, you are, are you? Then what are you doin’ with Labby’s friends? Take ’em along. Mr. Labouchere won’t be pleased at you.’
But the Sergeant was mightily pleased, save that his prisoners had not washed for some time. He said so. Then we drew to the home of lies, which is De Aar – a junction, the pivot of many of our manoeuvres and a telegraph centre.
It smelt like Umballa platform in the hot weather, and they kept a hell there of fifty half-naked telegraph operators, sweating under the blazing kerosene lamps, each man with two pairs of hands and some extra ears. Outside was thick darkness, and the shunting of trucks – thousands of trucks: but the steady boom of the racing instruments beat through all other noises like the noise of hiving bees.
There was some need to work, and, at least, one very good reason in the shape of a big saloon that glided past us in the night, a lit window revealing just a chair and a neat empty table. The Sirdar (Lord Kitchener) was on the move; going down to Naauwpoort to arrange surprises, and it is not at all healthy to be idle when Kitchener passes by. Therefore, and before this war is over, you will hear all sorts of baseless tales from a certain type of officer who has been made to work: and you must not believe them.
After De Aar time-tables ceased. We were cut adrift on the Sargasso Sea of accumulated rolling-stock between that place and Orange River. Here the rumours begin. There had been a killing – a big killing – the first satisfactory killing – at Paardeberg, up the Modder. Roberts held Cronje in a ring of fire burning day and night. That was none of our concern. We had some news that many wounded waited for us at Modder – thirty officers, at least, and twice as many men – all more or less bad cases.
Here and there one could catch the name of a dead man, and the Sister’s lips tightened. Was So-and-so alive? Well, he was a week ago someone had seen him. And Such-another? Oh, Such-another had been buried a week back. Could Number Three go ahead? Oh yes; but there was a block at the Modder, and Kimberley was sending down a full train.
Number Three whistled madly. Her business was to get up, load, and get away again. Belmont, with the bullet-holes through the station name-board, interested her not, nor Graspan either. She had been that road too often hot on the heels of the very fight itself. She checked despairingly, fifth in a line of long trains on the red smear of Modder Plain. The old bridge, wrecked by the Boers, was now all but repaired.
At present, Number Three would go over the trestle, but as to when Number Three would get across, authority could not say, and whistling was just waste of steam. Merciful rain had laid the dust which normally lies ten inches thick, and one could look all across the brick-red land.
By this time you probably know more about Modder than I; will have seen a hundred photographs of the naked, coverless plain that tilts to the thin line of trees and the dirty little river; lifting again northwards, as a slow wave of the Atlantic lifts, towards Shooter’s Hill, where the naval gun played. North of this again, a bluish lump in the morning light, rises Magersfontein. At that precise moment – but the camp fills and empties as quickly as the river – most of our men were out with Roberts nearly thirty miles to the westward. Vast empty acreages showed where their accommodation had stood. Men, horses, and wheels had wiped out every trace of herbage, and the diminishing perspective of their patient single files attested how far afield the camp-oxen had to go to graze. Horsemen by twos and threes wandered forth attacking interminable distances in which they were swallowed up. Sidings solid with trucks spurred left and right across the plain, and the trucks on the main line backed up to the very shoulders of the riveters repairing the bridge.
Number Three fought her way inch by inch, and was met by a little knot of Army Sisters. In civilisation their uniform is hideous, but out here one sees the use of the square-cut vermilion cape. Everything else is dust coloured, so a man need not ask where a Sister may be. She leaps to the eye across all the camp.
‘And where are our wounded?’ asks Number Three. ‘Still coming in from Paardeberg. They’re being dressed. You’ll get them later. Where are your spare doctors?’ We had come up with six surgeons taken from the big Wynberg and Rondebosch hospitals, where for months they had lived on a promise of work at the Front. They were not R.A.M.C. men, but house surgeons fresh from the Home hospitals, young, enthusiastic, and happy, though their baggage had been cut down to the thirty-five-pound scale, and they had not the ghost of a notion where they were going.
They were uncarted like stags on Modder platform, gazed awhile, met a man in authority, and were swiftly commandeered. Two or three doctors lay dead or wounded across the plains, and there was a hot press for the Medical Service.
Half a mile across the plain, behind the graves of the Highland Brigade, lay the hospital-tents, and thither loaded mule- and ox-wagons were heading. Like Number Three, they had been at the work a weary while. There came no surprise or bewilderment, hardly even any pity to the onlooker, as the big Red Crosses lurched and pitched. This, said the wagons, is the custom with the wounded. Stricken men are gathered as soon as possible by the bearer companies, whose casualty-list is a heavy one. They are dressed for the first time swiftly and efficiently; they are then put into the tilted wagons till they reach the hospital that sends them to the rail. The rail takes the badly wounded to Cape Town and the sea which leads to Netley.
This is the system, said the wagons, and here was the system all naked to the glaring day. Three nights had the wagons been on the road, rained upon, thundered over, and lightned about, jolted and jerked, and jarred; but the long and the short of it was that of eight hundred wounded the wagons had lost not one.
‘Would the hospitals take delivery, please?’ said the wagons, and they drew aside to rest; for their cattle were very, very tired.
As for Number Three? No, it would not be wise to visit Magersfontein. The train might be filled and sent away at any moment.
There was the old official ring about this, and I was not the least surprised that we waited eleven hours – time to have gone to Magersfontein and back on all fours. But I am glad I stayed by Number Three. It is early days to make that field of blood a show-place, and one can collect shells on other beaches when peace comes again.
The station was the centre of local society. The Staff, including a German prince, lived across the road in a battered caravanserai with scores of ponies tied to the veranda. The platform was banked with Red Cross cases, badly needed at Kimberley, and with mail bags badly needed by the men who came up, fingered them curiously, and slunk away. Business first, mails later. The telegraph office was a small edition of De Aar, hideously overworked. A knot of Sappers came up from the river, where they had been tamping ballast under new sidings. Other Sappers with ‘R.P.R.’ on their hats followed.
These last were the details of the Railway Pioneers, skilled mechanicians, and the like, of Johannesburg; and under the grime and the khaki one met a host of a certain weird dinner given in the Gold Reef city two years ago.
One gets used to privates with visiting-cards, and it is perfectly natural to discuss bacteriology, West African exploration, and the ethics of publishing, the intricacies of the Bankruptcy Act, and the prospects of the Labour party in South Australia with spurred troopers.
So it was not disconcerting to meet men of the Chitral siege, once prisoners in the hands of Omra Khan, old schoolmates, Indian Staff Corps men doing duty as ‘tail-twisters’ in the Transport, lost acquaintances of ten years ago, side by side with the fellow passenger of three weeks back, unrecognisable to-day under sunburn, hair, and dust.
It was only an undress rehearsal for the Day of Judgment.
A detail of Army Service men en route for Kimberley spread themselves at ease on their baggage, and chaffed a quartermaster-sergeant who had lost his sword but by the regulations was miserably tied to the empty scabbard till he could return the thing to store. A knot of excited Life Guards demanded news of French’s division. ‘Out since Sunday week and no news. We belong to ’em. We were sick. We want to rejoin. Do you know where he is?’
A Colonial suggested that cavalry divisions always suspend operations for the return of one corporal of horse and two dozen troopers.
A Gunner driver in a cart pored over a three-days-old Cape paper, for there is no news at the Modder. A man with a drawn face came out from nowhere and told a story. His wife had died at home of influenza: was dead and buried. His people could look after the children, thank God! But it hurt – it hurt cruelly. He spoke and vanished.
