“When we struck Pretoria I had a hell-and-a-half of a time trying to interest the Dutch vote in my gun an’ her potentialities. The bottom was out of things rather much just about that time. Kruger was praying some and stealing some, and the Hollander lot was singing, ‘If you haven’t any money you needn’t come round,’ Nobody was spending his dough on anything except tickets to Europe. We were both grossly neglected. When I think how I used to give performances in the public streets with dummy cartridges, filling the hopper and turning the handle till the sweat dropped off me, I blush, Sir. I’ve made her to do her stunts before Kaffirs — naked sons of Ham — in Commissioner Street, trying to get a holt somewhere.
“Did I talk? I despise exaggeration — ’tain’t American or scientific — but as true as I’m sitting here like a blue-ended baboon in a kloof, Teddy Roosevelt’s Western tour was a maiden’s sigh compared to my advertising work.
“‘Long in the spring I was rescued by a commandant called Van Zyl — a big, fleshy man with a lame leg. Take away his hair and his gun and he’d make a first-class Schenectady bar-keep. He found me and the Zigler on the veldt (Pretoria wasn’t wholesome at that time), and he annexed me in a somnambulistic sort o’ way. He was dead against the war from the start, but, being a Dutchman, he fought a sight better than the rest of that ‘God and the Mauser’ outfit. Adrian Van Zyl. Slept a heap in the daytime — and didn’t love niggers. I liked him. I was the only foreigner in his commando. The rest was Georgia Crackers and Pennsylvania Dutch — with a dash o’ Philadelphia lawyer. I could tell you things about them would surprise you. Religion for one thing; women for another; but I don’t know as their notions o’ geography weren’t the craziest. ‘Guess that must be some sort of automatic compensation. There wasn’t one blamed ant-hill in their district they didn’t know and use; but the world was flat, they said, and England was a day’s trek from Cape Town.
“They could fight in their own way, and don’t you forget it. But I guess you will not. They fought to kill, and, by what I could make out, the British fought to be killed. So both parties were accommodated.
“I am the captive of your bow and spear, Sir. The position has its obligations — on both sides. You could not be offensive or partisan to me. I cannot, for the same reason, be offensive to you. Therefore I will not give you my opinions on the conduct of your war.
“Anyway, I didn’t take the field as an offensive partisan, but as an
inventor. It was a condition and not a theory that confronted me. (Yes,
Sir, I’m a Democrat by conviction, and that was one of the best things
Grover Cleveland ever got off.)
“After three months’ trek, old man Van Zyl had his commando in good shape and refitted off the British, and he reckoned he’d wait on a British General of his acquaintance that did business on a circuit between Stompiesneuk, Jackhalputs, Vrelegen, and Odendaalstroom, year in and year out. He was a fixture in that section.
“‘He’s a dam’ good man,’ says Van Zyl. ‘He’s a friend of mine. He sent in a fine doctor when I was wounded and our Hollander doc. wanted to cut my leg off. Ya, I’ll guess we’ll stay with him.’ Up to date, me and my Zigler had lived in innocuous desuetude owing to little odds and ends riding out of gear. How in thunder was I to know there wasn’t the ghost of any road in the country? But raw hide’s cheap and lastin’. I guess I’ll make my next gun a thousand pounds heavier, though.
“Well, Sir, we struck the General on his beat — Vrelegen it was — and our crowd opened with the usual compliments at two thousand yards. Van Zyl shook himself into his greasy old saddle and says, ‘Now we shall be quite happy, Mr. Zigler. No more trekking. Joost twelve miles a day till the apricots are ripe.’
“Then we hitched on to his outposts, and vedettes, and cossack-picquets, or whatever they was called, and we wandered around the veldt arm in arm like brothers.
“The way we worked lodge was this way. The General, he had his breakfast at 8:45 A.M. to the tick. He might have been a Long Island commuter. At 8:42 A.M. I’d go down to the Thirty-fourth Street ferry to meet him — I mean I’d see the Zigler into position at two thousand (I began at three thousand, but that was cold and distant) — and blow him off to two full hoppers — eighteen rounds — just as they were bringing in his coffee. If his crowd was busy celebrating the anniversary of Waterloo or the last royal kid’s birthday, they’d open on me with two guns (I’ll tell you about them later on), but if they were disengaged they’d all stand to their horses and pile on the ironmongery, and washers, and typewriters, and five weeks’ grub, and in half an hour they’d sail out after me and the rest of Van Zyl’s boys; lying down and firing till 11:45 A.M. or maybe high noon. Then we’d go from labour to refreshment, resooming at 2 P.M. and battling till tea-time. Tuesday and Friday was the General’s moving days. He’d trek ahead ten or twelve miles, and we’d loaf around his flankers and exercise the ponies a piece. Sometimes he’d get hung up in a drift — stalled crossin’ a crick — and we’d make playful snatches at his wagons. First time that happened I turned the Zigler loose with high hopes, Sir; but the old man was well posted on rearguards with a gun to ‘em, and I had to haul her out with three mules instead of six. I was pretty mad. I wasn’t looking for any experts back of the Royal British Artillery. Otherwise, the game was mostly even. He’d lay out three or four of our commando, and we’d gather in four or five of his once a week or thereon. One time, I remember, long towards dusk we saw ‘em burying five of their boys. They stood pretty thick around the graves. We wasn’t more than fifteen hundred yards off, but old Van Zyl wouldn’t fire. He just took off his hat at the proper time. He said if you stretched a man at his prayers you’d have to hump his bad luck before the Throne as well as your own. I am inclined to agree with him. So we browsed along week in and week out. A war-sharp might have judged it sort of docile, but for an inventor needing practice one day and peace the next for checking his theories, it suited Laughton O. Zigler.
“And friendly? Friendly was no word for it. We was brothers in arms.
“Why, I knew those two guns of the Royal British Artillery as well as I used to know the old Fifth Avenoo stages. They might have been brothers too.
“They’d jolt into action, and wiggle around and skid and spit and cough and prize ‘emselves back again during our hours of bloody battle till I could have wept, Sir, at the spectacle of modern white men chained up to these old hand-power, back-number, flint-and-steel reaping machines. One of ‘em — I called her Baldy — she’d a long white scar all along her barrel — I’d made sure of twenty times. I knew her crew by sight, but she’d come switching and teturing out of the dust of my shells like — like a hen from under a buggy — and she’d dip into a gully, and next thing I’d know ‘ud be her old nose peeking over the ridge sniffin’ for us. Her runnin’ mate had two grey mules in the lead, and a natural wood wheel repainted, and a whole raft of rope-ends trailin’ around. ‘Jever see Tom Reed with his vest off, steerin’ Congress through a heat-wave? I’ve been to Washington often — too often — filin’ my patents. I called her Tom Reed. We three ‘ud play pussy-wants-a-corner all round the outposts on off-days — cross-lots through the sage and along the mezas till we was short-circuited by canons. O, it was great for me and Baldy and Tom Reed! I don’t know as we didn’t neglect the legitimate interests of our respective commanders sometimes for this ball-play. I know I did.
“‘Long towards the fall the Royal British Artillery grew shy — hung back in their breeching sort of — and their shooting was way — way off. I observed they wasn’t taking any chances, not though I acted kitten almost underneath ‘em.
“I mentioned it to Van Zyl, because it struck me I had about knocked their
Royal British moral endways.
“‘No,’ says he, rocking as usual on his pony. ‘My Captain Mankeltow he is sick. That is all.’
“‘So’s your Captain Mankeltow’s guns,’ I said. ‘But I’m going to make ‘em a heap sicker before he
gets well.’
“‘No,’ says Van Zyl. ‘He has had the enteric a little. Now he is better, and he was let out from hospital at Jackhalputs. Ah, that Mankeltow! He always makes me laugh so. I told him — long back — at Colesberg, I had a little home for him at Nooitgedacht. But he would not come — no! He has been sick, and I am sorry.’
“‘How d’you know that?’ I says.
“‘Why, only to-day he sends back his love by Johanna Van der Merwe, that goes to their doctor for her sick baby’s eyes. He sends his love, that Mankeltow, and he tells her tell me he has a little garden of roses all ready for me in the Dutch Indies — Umballa. He is very funny, my Captain Mankeltow.’
“The Dutch and the English ought to fraternise, Sir. They’ve the same notions of humour, to my thinking.’
“‘When he gets well,’ says Van Zyl, ‘you look out, Mr. Americaan. He comes back to his guns next Tuesday. Then they shoot better.’
“I wasn’t so well acquainted with the Royal British Artillery as old man Van Zyl. I knew this Captain Mankeltow by sight, of course, and, considering what sort of a man with the hoe he was, I thought he’d done right well against my Zigler. But nothing epoch-making.
“Next morning at the usual hour I waited on the General, and old Van Zyl come along with some of the boys. Van Zyl didn’t hang round the Zigler much as a rule, but this was his luck that day.
“He was peeking through his glasses at the camp, and I was helping pepper, the General’s sow-belly — just as usual — when he turns to me quick and says, ‘Almighty! How all these Englishmen are liars! You cannot trust one,’ he says. ‘Captain Mankeltow tells our Johanna he comes not back till Tuesday, and to-day is Friday, and there he is! Almighty! The English are all Chamberlains!’
“If the old man hadn’t stopped to make political speeches he’d have had his supper in laager that night, I guess. I was busy attending to Tom Reed at two thousand when Baldy got in her fine work on me. I saw one sheet of white flame wrapped round the hopper, and in the middle of it there was one o’ my mules straight on end. Nothing out of the way in a mule on end, but this mule hadn’t any head. I remember it struck me as incongruous at the time, and when I’d ciphered it out I was doing the Santos-Dumont act without any balloon and my motor out of gear. Then I got to thinking about Santos-Dumont and how much better my new way was. Then I thought about Professor Langley and the Smithsonian, and wishing I hadn’t lied so extravagantly in some of my specifications at Washington. Then I quit thinking for quite a while, and when I resumed my train of thought I was nude, Sir, in a very stale stretcher, and my mouth was full of fine dirt all flavoured with Laughtite.
“I coughed up that dirt.
“‘Hullo!’ says a man walking beside me. ‘You’ve spoke almost in time. Have a drink?’
“I don’t use rum as a rule, but I did then, because I needed it.
“‘What hit us?’I said.
“‘Me,’ he said. ‘I got you fair on the hopper as you pulled out of that donga; but I’m sorry to say every last round in the hopper’s exploded and your gun’s in a shocking state. I’m real sorry,’ he says. ‘I admire your gun, Sir.’
“‘Are you Captain Mankeltow?’ I says.
“‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I presoom you’re Mister Zigler. Your commanding officer told me about you.’
“‘Have you gathered in old man Van Zyl?’ I said.
“‘Commandant Van Zyl,’ he says very stiff, ‘was most unfortunately wounded, but I am glad to say it’s not serious. We hope he’ll be able to dine with us to-night; and I feel sure,’ he says, ‘the General would be delighted to see you too, though he didn’t expect,’ he says, ‘and no one else either, by Jove!’ he says, and blushed like the British do when they’re embarrassed.
“I saw him slide an Episcopalian Prayer-book up his sleeve, and when I looked over the edge of the stretcher there was half-a-dozen enlisted men — privates — had just quit digging and was standing to attention by their spades. I guess he was right on the General not expecting me to dinner; but it was all of a piece with their sloppy British way of doing business. Any God’s quantity of fuss and flubdub to bury a man, and not an ounce of forehandedness in the whole outfit to find out whether he was rightly dead. And I am a Congregationalist anyway!
“Well, Sir, that was my introduction to the British Army. I’d write a book about it if anyone would believe me. This Captain Mankeltow, Royal British Artillery, turned the doctor on me (I could write another book about him) and fixed me up with a suit of his own clothes, and fed me canned beef and biscuits, and give me a cigar — a Henry Clay and a whisky-and- sparklet. He was a white man.
“‘Ye-es, by Jove,’ he said, dragging out his words like a twist of molasses, ‘we’ve all admired your gun and the way you’ve worked it. Some of us betted you was a British deserter. I won a sovereign on that from a yeoman. And, by the way,’ he says, ‘you’ve disappointed me groom pretty bad.’
“‘Where does your groom come in?’ I said.
“‘Oh, he was the yeoman. He’s a dam poor groom,’ says my captain, ‘but he’s a way-up barrister when he’s at home. He’s been running around the camp with his tongue out, waiting for the chance of defending you at the court-martial.’
“‘What court-martial?’ I says.
“‘On you as a deserter from the Artillery. You’d have had a good run for your money. Anyway, you’d never have been hung after the way you worked your gun. Deserter ten times over,’ he says, ‘I’d have stuck out for shooting you like a gentleman.’
“Well, Sir, right there it struck me at the pit of my stomach — sort of sickish, sweetish feeling — that my position needed regularising pretty bad. I ought to have been a naturalised burgher of a year’s standing; but Ohio’s my State, and I wouldn’t have gone back on her for a desertful of Dutchmen. That and my enthoosiasm as an inventor had led me to the existing crisis; but I couldn’t expect this Captain Mankeltow to regard the proposition that way. There I sat, the rankest breed of unreconstructed American citizen, caught red-handed squirting hell at the British Army for months on end. I tell you, Sir, I wished I was in Cincinnatah that summer evening. I’d have compromised on Brooklyn.
“‘What d’you do about aliens?’ I said, and the dirt I’d coughed up seemed all back of my tongue again.
“‘Oh,’ says he, ‘we don’t do much of anything. They’re about all the society we get. I’m a bit of a pro-Boer myself,’ he says, ‘but between you and me the average Boer ain’t over and above intellectual. You’re the first American we’ve met up with, but of course you’re a burgher.’
“It was what I ought to have been if I’d had the sense of a common tick, but the way he drawled it out made me mad.
“‘Of course I am not,’ I says. ‘Would you be a naturalised Boer?’
“‘I’m fighting against ‘em,’ he says, lighting a cigarette, ‘but it’s all a matter of opinion.’
“‘Well,’ I says, ‘you can hold any blame opinion you choose, but I’m a white man, and my present intention is to die in that colour.’
“He laughed one of those big, thick-ended, British laughs that don’t lead anywhere, and whacked up some sort of compliment about America that made me mad all through.
“I am the captive of your bow and spear, Sir, but I do not understand the alleged British joke. It is depressing.
“I was introdooced to five or six officers that evening, and every blame one of ‘em grinned and asked me why I wasn’t in the Filipeens suppressing our war! And that was British humour! They all had to get it off their chests before they’d talk sense. But they was sound on the Zigler. They had all admired her. I made out a fairy-story of me being wearied of the war, and having pushed the gun at them these last three months in the hope they’d capture it and let me go home. That tickled ‘em to death. They made me say it three times over, and laughed like kids each time. But half the British are kids; specially the older men. My Captain Mankeltow was less of it than the others. He tal
ked about the Zigler like a lover, Sir, and I drew him diagrams of the hopper-feed and recoil-cylinder in his note-book. He asked the one British question I was waiting for, ‘Hadn’t I made my working-parts too light?’ The British think weight’s strength.
“At last — I’d been shy of opening the subject before — at last I said, ‘Gentlemen, you are the unprejudiced tribunal I’ve been hunting after. I guess you ain’t interested in any other gun-factory, and politics don’t weigh with you. How did it feel your end of the game? What’s my gun done, anyway?’
“‘I hate to disappoint you,’ says Captain Mankeltow, ‘because I know you feel as an inventor.’ I wasn’t feeling like an inventor just then. I felt friendly, but the British haven’t more tact than you can pick up with a knife out of a plate of soup.
“‘The honest truth,’ he says, ‘is that you’ve wounded about ten of us one way and another, killed two battery horses and four mules, and — oh, yes,’ he said, ‘you’ve bagged five Kaffirs. But, buck up,’ he said, ‘we’ve all had mighty close calls’ — shaves, he called ‘em, I remember. ‘Look at my pants.’
“They was repaired right across the seat with Minneapolis flour-bagging. I could see the stencil.
“‘I ain’t bluffing,’ he says. ‘Get the hospital returns, Doc.’
“The doctor gets ‘em and reads ‘em out under the proper dates. That doctor alone was worth the price of admission.
“I was right pleased right through that I hadn’t killed any of these cheerful kids; but none the less I couldn’t help thinking that a few more Kaffirs would have served me just as well for advertising purposes as white men. No, sir. Anywhichway you regard the proposition, twenty-one casualties after months of close friendship like ours was — paltry.
“They gave me taffy about the gun — the British use taffy where we use sugar. It’s cheaper, and gets there just the same. They sat around and proved to me that my gun was too good, too uniform — shot as close as a Mannlicher rifle.
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 366