te, despondent people back to their desolated homes, reuniting
swarthy fathers and stockish mothers, witnessing their touchingly
inexpressive encounters, doing what one could to put heart into their
resumption. Memories come back to me of great littered heaps of luggage,
bundles, blankets, rough boxes, piled newly purchased stores, ready-made
doors, window sashes heaped ready for the waggons, slow-moving,
apathetic figures sitting and eating, an infernal squawking of parrots,
sometimes a wailing of babies. Repatriation went on to a parrot
obligato, and I never hear a parrot squawk without a flash of South
Africa across my mind. All the prisoners, I believe, brought back
parrots--some two or three. I had to spread these people out, over a
country still grassless, with teams of war-worn oxen, mules and horses
that died by the dozen on my hands. The end of each individual instance
was a handshake, and one went lumbering on, leaving the children one had
deposited behind one already playing with old ration-tins or hunting
about for cartridge-cases, while adults stared at the work they had to
do.

There was something elementary in all that redistribution. I felt at
times like a child playing in a nursery and putting out its bricks and
soldiers on the floor. There was a kind of greatness too about the
process, a quality of atonement. And the people I was taking back, the
men anyhow, were for the most part charming and wonderful people, very
simple and emotional, so that once a big bearded man, when I wanted him
in the face of an overflowing waggon to abandon about half-a-dozen great
angular colored West Indian shells he had lugged with him from Bermuda,
burst into tears of disappointment. I let him take them, and at the end
I saw them placed with joy and reverence in a little parlor, to become
the war heirlooms no doubt of a long and bearded family. As we shook
hands after our parting coffee he glanced at them with something between
gratitude and triumph in his eyes.

Yes, that was a great work, more especially for a ripening youngster
such as I was at that time. The memory of long rides and tramps over
that limitless veld returns to me, lonely in spite of the creaking,
lumbering waggons and transport riders and Kaffirs that followed behind.
South Africa is a country not only of immense spaces but of an immense
spaciousness. Everything is far apart; even the grass blades are far
apart. Sometimes one crossed wide stony wastes,