ateur_. Chance had put this work in my way, and started me upon
it with a reputation that wasn't altogether deserved, and I found I
could only live up to it and get things done well by a fixed and extreme
concentration of my attention. But the whole business was so interesting
that I found it possible to make that concentration. Essentially warfare
is a game of elaborate but witty problems in precaution and
anticipation, with amazing scope for invention. You so saturate your
mind with the facts and possibilities of the situation that intuitions
emerge. It did not do to think of anything beyond those facts and
possibilities and dodges and counterdodges, for to do so was to let in
irrelevant and distracting lights. During all that concluding year of
service I was not so much myself as a forced and artificial thing I made
out of myself to meet the special needs of the time. I became a
Boer-outwitting animal. When I was tired of this specialized thinking,
then the best relief, I found, was some quite trivial
occupation--playing poker, yelling in the chorus of some interminable
song one of the men would sing, or coining South African Limericks or
playing burlesque _bouts-rimes_ with Fred Maxim, who was then my second
in command....

Yet occasionally thought overtook me. I remember lying one night out
upon a huge dark hillside, in a melancholy wilderness of rock-ribbed
hills, waiting for one of the flying commandoes that were breaking
northward from Cape Colony towards the Orange River in front of Colonel
Eustace. We had been riding all day, I was taking risks in what I was
doing, and there is something very cheerless in a fireless bivouac. My
mind became uncontrollably active.

It was a clear, still night. The young moon set early in a glow of white
that threw the jagged contours of a hill to the south-east into
strange, weird prominence. The patches of moonshine evaporated from the
summits of the nearer hills, and left them hard and dark. Then there was
nothing but a great soft black darkness below that jagged edge and above
it the stars very large and bright. Somewhere under that enormous
serenity to the south of us the hunted Boers must be halting to snatch
an hour or so of rest, and beyond them again extended the long thin net
of the pursuing British. It all seemed infinitely small and remote,
there was no sound of it, no hint of it, no searchlight at work, no
faintest streamer of smoke nor the reflection of a solitary