A night without water or fodder, a long march round behind the German position to cut off the retreat, and some fighting. It was a very different Devil that stood beside me somewhere south of the Rufiji four months later. When everyone else was worn out and weary, he'd hold up his eager head and stride along as if he never knew fatigue.īut the strain told. Through those long weary days of striving Shaitan and I got to know each other, though he often did try to give me a nip in the seat of the breeches when I mounted. One learnt, for the first time in one's life, to value water. Up above the canopy of leaves and inter-twining branches almost blotted out the sky.

Here and there thin, gnarled branches hung down like the withered tentacles of some great forest octopus groping in the earth. One longed to push it all away and hold up one's head and breathe.Īll around huge trees towered up out of the ground, bent and twisted into grotesque shapes as they fought each other for the space to live. In places we came across open grassland, but most of it was dense. The country was unlike anything I had seen before. In three days he was ridable, and when, on the fourth, we started off, I took him as my charger. All horses hate that, and he soon gave in. But we hadn't time for that we had to be ruthless. His was the nervous kind of temperament one should have coaxed. He certainly was a devil at the beginning. My orderly christened him Shaitan (the Devil), mainly, I think, because the first thing the horse did was to bite him in the seat of the breeches. He came to my squadron, and I picked him out as a charger because his head and ears, fine muzzle, and wide nostrils showed breeding. He landed at a malarial little port called Kilwa Kissiwani, and, the day after, was handed over with a batch of remounts to an Indian cavalry regiment. The herding down to the coast and the long stifling sea voyage up to German East must have been unpleasantly strange.

He only knew an unmolested life on a South African farm, and the sudden change upset him. It wasn't viciousness: he was young he had never been backed before he didn't understand. The first time we tried to saddle him he sent two men to hospital.

Men at war assault squad 2 no fade away