They
are printed as a natural comment on the situation. What I always feel
is, now as when I was out there, that the chances of a future agreement
would be very much improved if the English people were to treat the
Boers in the way that brave enemies ought to be treated, with a certain
amount of courtesy and respect.]
LETTER XXVI
PLAIN MISTER!
Cape Town.
I am trying to din the fact into my head that I am a civilian again and
not a soldier any more. It is difficult. I find myself looking
questioningly at my suit of grey flannel. It feels like a disguise. No
soldiers' hands as I pass them rise in salute now, though my own
involuntarily half rises in answer They look at me and take no notice. A
recruiting sergeant tried to induce me this morning to join an irregular
corps. He told me I should get five shillings a day, and that it was a
fine life and a beautiful country.
And yet I know that, in a few days even, the civilian life that seems so
unreal now will be the real, and the old soldier life the unreal. I
shall not in my walks find my eyes wandering "with a vague surmise" over
the nearest hilltops in search of Boers, nor measuring unconsciously the
range from the top of Table Mountain, which I find myself doing even as
I write this, looking up at it through the window. The trekking, the
fighting, the croak of the invisible rifle, the glare of the sun, the
row of swarthy determined faces, the roar of horse hoofs, all this, and
the lounging days by river banks (shooting guinea-fowl and springbuck),
will drop back and be shut off from one's life to rise now and then, I
suppose, with the creeping of an old excitement in one's memory.
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