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“So ‘e made ’em ‘imself. Useful old bird.” Private Copper sliced up another pipeful and looked out across the wrinkled sea of kopjes, through which came the roar of the rushing Orange River, so unlike quiet Cuckmere.

The young man’s face darkened. “I think I shall sjambok you myself when I’ve quite done with you. No, my father (he was a fool) made no terms for eight years–ninety-six months–and for every day of them the Transvaal made his life hell for my father and–his people.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” said the impenitent Copper.

“Are you? You can think of it when I’m taking the skin off your back– eh?… My father, he lost everything–everything down to his self-respect. You don’t know what thatt means–eh?”

“Why?” said Copper. “I’m smokin’ baccy stole by a renegid. Why wouldn’t I know?”

If it came to a flogging on that hillside there might be a chance of reprisals. Of course, he might be marched to the Boer camp in the next valley and there operated upon; but Army life teaches no man to cross bridges unnecessarily.

“Yes, after eight years, my father, cheated by your bitch of a country, he found out who was the upper dog in South Africa.”

“That’s me,” said Copper valiantly. “If it takes another ‘alf century, it’s me an’ the likes of me.”

“You? Heaven help you! You’ll be screaming at a wagon-wheel in an hour…. Then it struck my father that he’d like to shoot the people who’d betrayed him. You–you–you! He told his son all about it. He told him never to trust the English. He told him to do them all the harm he could. Mann, I tell you, I don’t want much telling. I was born in the Transvaal–I’m a burgher. If my father didn’t love the English, by the Lord, mann, I tell you, I hate them from the bottom of my soul.”

The voice quavered and ran high. Once more, for no conceivable reason, Private Copper found his inward eye turned upon Umballa cantonments of a dry dusty afternoon, when the saddle-coloured son of a local hotel-keeper came to the barracks to complain of a theft of fowls. He saw the dark face, the plover’s-egg-tinted eyeballs, and the thin excited hands. Above all, he remembered the passionate, queerly-strung words. Slowly he returned to South Africa, using the very sentence his sergeant had used to the poultry man.

“Go on with your complaint. I’m listenin’.”

“Complaint! Complaint about you, you ox! We strip and kick your sort by thousands.”

The young man rocked to and fro above the rifle, whose muzzle thus deflected itself from the pit of Private Copper’s stomach. His face was dusky with rage.

“Yess, I’m a Transvaal burgher. It took us about twenty years to find out how rotten you were. We know and you know it now. Your army–it is the laughing-stock of the Continent.” He tapped the newspaper in his pocket, “You think you’re going to win, you poor fools. Your people–your own people–your silly rotten fools of people will crawl out of it as they did after Majuba. They are beginning now. Look what your own working classes, the diseased, lying, drinking white stuff that you come out of, are saying.” He thrust the English weekly, doubled at the leading article, on Copper’s knee. “See what dirty dogs your masters are. They do not even back you in your dirty work. We cleared the country down to Ladysmith– to Estcourt. We cleared the country down to Colesberg.”

“Yes, we ‘ad to clean up be’ind you. Messy, I call it.”

“You’ve had to stop farm-burning because your people daren’t do it. They were afraid. You daren’t kill a spy. You daren’t shoot a spy when you catch him in your own uniform. You daren’t touch our loyall people in Cape Town! Your masters wont let you. You will feed our women and children till we are quite ready to take them back. You can’t put your cowardly noses out of the towns you say you’ve occupied. You daren’t move a convoy twenty miles. You think you’ve done something? You’ve done nothing, and you’ve taken a quarter of a million of men to do it! There isn’t a nigger in South Africa that doesn’t obey us if we lift our finger. You pay the stuff four pounds a month and they lie to you. We flog ’em, as I shall flog you.”