“Next day it so happened that I shot this man, and, do you know, I think that he is about the only human being who has come to harm at my hands for whom I do not feel sincere sorrow and, in a degree, remorse.”

VII—­THE ATTACK

“Just where we halted ran a little stream of water.  I looked at it, and an idea struck me:  probably there would be no water on the koppie.  I suggested this to our captain, and, acting on the hint, he directed all the men to drink what they could, and also to fill the seven or eight cooking pots which we carried with us with water.  Then came the crucial moment.  How were we to get possession of the koppie?  When the captain asked me, I said that I thought that we had better march up and take it, and this accordingly we went on to do.  When we came to the narrow gateway we were, as I expected stopped by two soldiers who stood on guard there and asked our business.  The captain answered that we had changed our minds, and would follow on to Wambe’s kraal.  The soldiers said no, we must now wait.

“To this we replied by pushing them to one side and marching in single file through the gateway, which was not distant more than a hundred yards from the koppie.  While we were getting through, the men we had pushed away ran towards the town calling for assistance, a call that was promptly responded to, for in another minute we saw scores of armed men running hard in our direction.  So we ran too, for the koppie.  As soon as they understood what we were after, which they did not at first, owing to the dimness of the light, they did their best to get there before us.  But we had the start of them, and with the exception of one unfortunate man who stumbled and fell, we were well on to the koppie before they arrived.  This man they captured, and when fighting began on the following morning, and he refused to give any information, they killed him.  Luckily they had no time to torture him, or they would certainly have done so, for these Matuku people are very fond of torturing their enemies.

“When we reached the koppie, the base of which covers about half an acre of ground, the soldiers who had been trying to cut us off halted, for they knew the strength of the position.  This gave us a few minutes before the light had quite vanished to reconnoitre the place.  We found that it was unoccupied, fortified with a regular labyrinth of stone walls, and contained three large caves and some smaller ones.  The next business was to post the soldiers to such advantage as time would allow.  My own men I was careful to place quite at the top.  They were perfectly useless from terror, and I feared that they might try to escape and give information of our plans to Wambe.  So I watched them like the apple of my eye, telling them that should they dare to stir they would be shot.