Of course one does not become a soldier on active service at once for
the wishing, and there was not at first that ready disposition on the
part of the home military authorities which arose later, to send out
young enthusiasts. I could ride and shoot fairly well, and accordingly I
decided to go on my own account to Durban--for it was manifest that
things would begin in Natal--and there attach myself to some of the
local volunteer corps that would certainly be raised. This took me out
of England at once, a thing that fell in very well with my mood. I
would, I was resolved, begin life afresh. I would force myself to think
of nothing but the war. I would never if I could help it think of Mary
again.

The war had already begun when I reached Durban. The town was seething
with the news of a great British victory at Dundee. We came into the
port through rain and rough weather and passed a big white liner loaded
up feverishly from steam tenders with wealthy refugees going
England-ward. From two troopships against the wharves there was a great
business of landing horses--the horses of the dragoons and hussars from
India. I spent the best part of my first night in South Africa in the
streets looking in vain for a bedroom, and was helped at last by a
kindly rickshaw Zulu to a shanty where I slept upon three chairs. I
remember I felt singularly unwanted.

The next day I set about my volunteering. By midday I had opened
communications with that extremely untried and problematical body, the
Imperial Light Horse, and in three days more I was in the company of a
mixed batch of men, mostly Australian volunteers, on my way to a place I
had never heard of before called Ladysmith, through a country of
increasing picturesqueness and along a curious curving little line whose
down traffic seemed always waiting in sidings, and consisted of crowded
little trains full of pitiful fugitives, white, brown, and black,
stifled and starving. They were all clamoring to buy food and drink--and
none seemed forthcoming. We shunted once to allow a southbound train to
pass, a peculiar train that sent everyone on to the line to
see--prisoners of war! There they were, real live enemies, rather glum,
looking out at us with faces very like our own--but rather more
unshaven. They had come from the battle of Elandslaagte....

I had never been out of England before except for a little
mountaineering in the French Alps and one walking excursion in the Black
F