FullReads

‘All the same,’ sighed Hannah, ‘I do hope they will just be used to guard the lines of communication.’ She was full of war-knowledge acquired with painful eagerness, prattled of Basuto ponies and Mauser bullets, pontoons and pom-poms, knew the exact position of the armies, and marked her war-map with coloured pins.

Simon, too, had developed quite a literary talent under the pressure of so much vivid new life, and from his cheery letters she learned much that was not in the papers, especially in those tense days when the C.I.V.’S did at last get to the front–and remained there: tales of horses mercifully shot, and sheep mercilessly poisoned, and oxen dropping dead as they dragged the convoys; tales of muddle and accident, tales of British soldiers slain by their own protective cannon as they lay behind ant-heaps facing the enemy, and British officers culled under the very eyes of the polo-match; tales of hospital and camp, of shirts turned sable and putties worn to rags, and all the hidden miseries of uncleanliness and insanitation that underlie the glories of war. There were tales, too, of quarter-rations; but these she did not read to her husband, lest the mention of ‘bully-beef’ should remind him of how his son must be eating forbidden food. Once, even, two fat pigs were captured at a hungry moment for the battalion. But there came a day when S. Cohn seized those letters and read them first. He began to speak of his boy at the war–nay, to read the letters to enthralled groups in the synagogue lobby–groups that swallowed without reproach the tripha meat cooked in Simon’s mess-tin.

It was like being Gabbai over again.

Moreover, Simon’s view of the Boer was so strictly orthodox as to give almost religious satisfaction to the proud parent. ‘A canting hypocrite, a psalm-singer and devil-dodger, he has no civilization worth the name, and his customs are filthy. Since the great trek he has acquired, from long intercourse with his Kaffir slaves, many of the native’s savage traits. In short, a born liar, credulous and barbarous, crassly ignorant and inconceivably stubborn.’

‘Crassly ignorant and inconceivably stubborn,’ repeated S. Cohn, pausing impressively. ‘Haven’t I always said that? The boy only bears out what I knew without going there. But hear further! “Is it to be wondered at that the Boer farmer, hidden in the vast undulations of the endless veldt, with his wife, his children and his slaves, should lose all sense of proportion, ignorant of the outside world, his sole knowledge filtering through Jo-burgh?”‘

As S. Cohn made another dramatic pause, it was suddenly borne in on his wife with a stab of insight that he was reading a description of himself–nay, of herself, of her whole race, hidden in the great world, awaiting some vague future of glory that never came. The important voice of her husband broke again upon her reflections:

‘”He has held many nights of supplication to his fetish, and is still unconvinced that his God of Battles is asleep.”‘ The reader chuckled, and a broad smile overspread the synagogue lobby. ‘”They are brave–oh, yes, but it is not what we mean by it–they are good fighters, because they have Dutch blood at the back of them, and a profound contempt for us. Their whole life has been spent on the open veldt (we are always fighting them on somebody’s farm, who knows every inch of the ground), and they never risk anything except in the trap sort of manoeuvres. The brave rush of our Tommies is unknown to them, and their slim nature would only see the idiocy of walking into a death-trap, cool as in a play. Were there ever two races less alike?”‘ wound up the youthful philosopher in his tent. ‘”I really do not see how they are to live together after the war.”‘

‘That’s easy enough,’ S. Cohn had already commented to his wife as oracularly as if she did not read the same morning paper. ‘Intermarriage! In a generation or two there will be one fine Anglo-African race. That’s the solution–mark my words. And you can tell the boy as much–only don’t say I told you to write to him.’