Rudely but deeply they bedded the plinth
of the days to come.
Behind the feet of the Legions and before
the Northman’s ire,
Rudely but greatly begat they the body
of state and of shire.
Rudely but greatly they laboured, and
their labour stands till now
If we trace on our ancient headlands the
twist of their eight-ox plough.
THE COMPREHENSION OF PRIVATE COPPER
Private Copper’s father was a Southdown shepherd;
in early youth Copper had studied under him.
Five years’ army service had somewhat blunted
Private Copper’s pastoral instincts, but it occurred
to him as a memory of the Chalk that sheep, or in
this case buck, do not move towards one across turf,
or in this case, the Colesberg kopjes unless a stranger,
or in this case an enemy, is in the neighbourhood.
Copper, helmet back-first advanced with caution, leaving
his mates of the picket full a mile behind. The
picket, concerned for its evening meal, did not protest.
A year ago it would have been an officer’s command,
moving as such. To-day it paid casual allegiance
to a Canadian, nominally a sergeant, actually a trooper
of Irregular Horse, discovered convalescent in Naauwport
Hospital, and forthwith employed on odd jobs.
Private Copper crawled up the side of a bluish rock-strewn
hill thinly fringed with brush atop, and remembering
how he had peered at Sussex conies through the edge
of furze-clumps, cautiously parted the dry stems before
his face. At the foot of the long slope sat three
farmers smoking. To his natural lust for tobacco
was added personal wrath because spiky plants were
pricking his belly, and Private Copper slid the backsight
up to fifteen hundred yards....
“Good evening, Khaki. Please don’t
move,” said a voice on his left, and as he jerked
his head round he saw entirely down the barrel of a
well-kept Lee-Metford protruding from an insignificant
tuft of thorn. Very few graven images have moved
less than did Private Copper through the next ten
seconds.
“It’s nearer seventeen hundred than fifteen,”
said a young man in an obviously ready-made suit of
grey tweed, possessing himself of Private Copper’s
rifle. “Thank you. We’ve
got a post of thirty-seven men out yonder. You’ve
eleven—eh? We don’t want to kill
’em. We have no quarrel with poor uneducated
Khakis, and we do not want prisoners we do not keep.
It is demoralising to both sides—eh?”
Private Cooper did not feel called upon to lay down
the conduct of guerilla warfare. This dark-skinned,
dark-haired, and dark-eyed stranger was his first
intimate enemy. He spoke, allowing for a clipped
cadence that recalled to Copper vague memories of
Umballa, in precisely the same offensive accent that
the young squire of Wilmington had used fifteen years
ago when he caught and kicked Alf Copper, a rabbit
in each pocket, out of the ditches of Cuckmere.
The enemy looked Copper up and down, folded and re-pocketed
a copy of an English weekly which he had been reading,
and said: “You seem an inarticulate sort
of swine—like the rest of them—eh?”
