Boers had been seen to the
east and on the west; some at least of the Dutch colonists were in open
revolt; so officers and men were always prepared at a moment's notice to
line the trenches for defence, while the redoubts and the batteries on
the hills were permanently garrisoned.
Everybody loathed De Aar. With the exception of some feeble cricket
played on some unoccupied patches of dusty ground, and a couple of
shabby tennis courts, usually reserved for the "patball" of the local
athletes of either sex, there was absolutely nothing to do, and we were
too far off Modder River to feel that we were at all in the swim of
things. The heat was sometimes appalling. On Christmas day the
temperature was 105 deg. in the shade, and most people took a long siesta
after the midday dinner and read such odds and ends of literature as
fell into their hands.
We train people, of course, read and slumbered in one of the wards,
while our comrades under canvas lay with eight heads meeting in the
centre of a tent and sixteen legs projecting from it like the spokes of
a wheel. Mercifully enough scorpions were few and far between at De Aar,
so one could feel fairly secure from these pests. How different it was
in the Sudan campaign, especially at some camps like Um Teref, where
batches of soldiers black and white came to be treated for scorpion
stings, which in one case were fatal.
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