It was during the season that followed, when, as a correspondent of an English paper neatly put it, we "held the railway and shouted for help," that we realized the real, inner meaning of monotony. At first we expected to get going in a week, then we put the time forward to months, and finally we resigned ourselves. To live in standing camp for the rest of our natural lives, to do long patrol, short patrol, and "bait" patrol for ever and ever seemed the best we could hope of life. Letters arrived with some regularity, for we were then only some few miles over the border. Papers drifted through to us, and we knew more of the happenings in Europe than we did of our own campaign, though occasionally we gleaned some items of local interest from the English papers. It annoyed us to see an alleged illustration of one of our "scraps," in which smart-looking men on ramping horses were represented as fighting in open country at five hundred yards, whilst in reality it was done by untidy men on mules, in thick bush, at forty yards. The real thing was much better than the artist's conception of it.
There are, as I have implied, three kinds of patrol--the long patrol, on which you spend many days scouring the burning veldt for Germans, and hoping you won't find them; the short patrol, on which you spend one day doing the same thing; and the "bait" patrol, on which you spend the cold and cheerless hours before dawn wandering round the camp and hoping the Germans won't find _you_. On the latter it is the earnest desire of your King and country that the noise of your getting shot will alarm the camp before the attack takes place. If, on these occasions, you meet a lion, or any vermin of that kind, you must allow him to bash you on the head and dine off your limbs rather than raise a false alarm. One of our fellows met a lioness with cubs on one of these cheery rambles, and was only saved by the fact that he and his mule both froze stiff with terror, and baffled her by not running away. He moved off slowly at last, and she followed the patrol till dawn, obviously puzzled by these strange beings.
Of long patrol your first intimation of the joy in store for you usually is an excited clucking of the telephone buzzer at 2 a. m. on a particularly joyless morning. "Kaar-kuk-kuk! Kaar-kuk-kuk!" it observes, exactly like a hen that has laid an egg. Of course, the obvious thing to do is to fling a boot at the 'phone and go to sleep; but we signallers have a strong sense of duty, so we call the adjutant, who takes a mean revenge by telling us to be saddled up in fifteen minutes and go out for ten days to some "ticky" and waterless part of Africa which is, according to the 'phone, swarming with Germans.
