e of the
English. But if I had less national conceit, I had certainly more
patriotic determination. That grew with every day of returning health.
The reality of this war had got hold of my imagination, as indeed for a
time it got hold of the English imagination altogether, and I was now
almost fiercely keen to learn and do. At the first chance I returned to
active service, and now I was no longer a disconsolate lover taking war
for a cure, but an earnest, and I think reasonably able, young officer,
very alert for chances.

I got those chances soon enough. I rejoined our men beyond Kimberley, on
the way to Mafeking,--we were the extreme British left in the advance
upon Pretoria--and I rode with Mahon and was ambushed with him in a
little affair beyond Koodoosrand. It was a sudden brisk encounter. We
got fired into at close quarters, but we knew our work by that time,
and charged home and brought in a handful of prisoners to make up for
the men we had lost. A few days later we came into the flattened ruins
of the quaintest siege in history....

Three days after we relieved Mafeking I had the luck to catch one of
Snyman's retreating guns rather easily, the only big gun that was taken
at Mafeking. I came upon it unexpectedly with about twenty men, spotted
a clump of brush four hundred yards ahead, galloped into it before the
Boers realized the boldness of our game, shot all the draught oxen while
they hesitated, and held them up until Chambers arrived on the scene.
The incident got perhaps a disproportionate share of attention in the
papers at home, because of the way in which Mafeking had been kept in
focus. I was mentioned twice again in despatches before we rode across
to join Roberts in Pretoria and see what we believed to be the end of
the war. We were too late to go on up to Komatipoort, and had some
rather blank and troublesome work on the north side of the town. That
was indeed the end of the great war; the rest was a struggle with
guerillas.

Everyone thought things were altogether over. I wrote to my father
discussing the probable date of my return. But there were great chances
still to come for an active young officer; the guerilla war was to
prolong the struggle yet for a whole laborious, eventful year, and I was
to make the most of those later opportunities....

Those years in South Africa are stuck into my mind like--like those pink
colored pages about something else one finds at times in a railway
_Indic