ders unless they is 'is own;
'E keeps 'is side-arms awful: 'e leaves 'em all about
An' then comes up the regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out.
All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,
All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less,
All along of abby-nay, kul, an' hazar-ho,
Mind you keep your rifle an' yourself jus' so!"

It is after all a secondary matter that Kipling, not having been born
and brought up in Bromstead and Penge, and the war in South Africa
being yet in the womb of time, could quite honestly entertain the now
remarkable delusion that England had her side-arms at that time kept
anything but "awful." He learnt better, and we all learnt with him in
the dark years of exasperating and humiliating struggle that followed,
and I do not see that we fellow learners are justified in turning
resentfully upon him for a common ignorance and assumption....

South Africa seems always painted on the back cloth of my Cambridge
memories. How immense those disasters seemed at the time, disasters
our facile English world has long since contrived in any edifying or
profitable sense to forget! How we thrilled to the shouting newspaper
sellers as the first false flush of victory gave place to the
realisation of defeat. Far away there our army showed itself human,
mortal and human in the sight of all the world, the pleasant officers we
had imagined would change to wonderful heroes at the first crackling of
rifles, remained the pleasant, rather incompetent men they had always
been, failing to imagine, failing to plan and co-operate, failing to
grip. And the common soldiers, too, they were just what our streets and
country-side had made them, no sudden magic came out of the war bugles
for them. Neither splendid nor disgraceful were they,--just ill-trained
and fairly plucky and wonderfully good-tempered men--paying for it. And
how it lowered our vitality all that first winter to hear of Nicholson's
Nek, and then presently close upon one another, to realise the
bloody waste of Magersfontein, the shattering retreat from Stormberg,
Colenso--Colenso, that blundering battle, with White, as it seemed, in
Ladysmith near the point of surrender! and so through the long unfolding
catalogue of bleak disillusionments, of aching, unconcealed anxiety lest
worse should follow. To advance upon your enemy singing about his lack
of cleanliness and method went out of fashion altogether! The dirty
re