At any rate,
they let us alone. Very stiff and weary and wet, we crept down the hill
soon after daybreak and started on our twenty-mile homeward march. It
was 5 P.M. before we reached camp, and we had had nothing to eat all
day. I don't know if we were most tired or hungry. Take that three days
as a sample of work. We start at 6 A.M. on Sunday; do a full day's
riding and scouting, and get three hours' sleep that night at Enslin.
Then we saddle up and pass the rest of the night and all the next day
riding, except when we are climbing hills on foot to look out. The
second night we sit among the hills expecting an attack, and next day
till one o'clock are in the saddle again. _A la guerre comme a la
guerre_. Three days and two nights' hard work on three hours' sleep. And
all this time you are drinking champagne (well, most of it, anyway), and
sleeping in soft beds with delicious white sheets, and smoking Egyptian
cigarettes, and wearing clean clothes, with nice stiff collars and shirt
cuffs, and having a bath in the morning, warm, with sweet-smelling soap
(Oh, my God!), and sitting side by side at table, first a man and then a
woman; the same old arrangement, I suppose, knives to the right and
forks to the left as usual. Ho! ho! There are times I could laugh. No
doubt we shall all get _redigested_ as soon as we get back, but
meantime, as a set-off to the hardship, one knows what it is to feel
free.
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