at tea with
the Red Cross Sisters]

[Illustration: Awaiting the Advance. Garrison Sports at Swakopmund.
Start for 100 yards race]

[Illustration: Awaiting the Advance. Garrison Sports. Winner]

It is difficult to write about Swakopmund. As a town it is the most
extraordinary place I have seen. I use the superlative deliberately.
But I do not wish to live there. It is purely artificial, and
artificial to a ghastly degree too. There is not a spot of vegetation.
There is not a genuine tree to be seen. The water has a detestable,
unsatisfying blurred taste, to which the adjective "brackish" is
applied. It is probable that a town occupied by enemy troops does not
look at its best; but the fact that it was under such conditions when I
first knew Swakopmund makes no important difference. The place in its
essentials must always be the same. If ever there was a work of bluff
Swakopmund is that thing. One fancies the German commercial expert, a
Government official, or, maybe, a representative of the ubiquitous
Woermann, Brock & Co., looking along this ferocious and awful coast for
a spot to found a town that should appear on the maps and be esteemed a
seaport. The Swakop River? Very well. Was there water there? But
certainly so; water obviously of the worst quality--yet water. Besides,
were there not always refrigerators and condensing machinery? Upon
which Swakopmund was forced into existence--planked down there bit by
bit in the face of circumstance. Walk a trifle over 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