Words by an Eyewitness; The Struggle in Natal

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. In the lives of most men there has been a week at the memory of which ever afterwards a dark cloud comes down and makes a possibly sunny world momentarily a place of gloom. It may have been a week of injury or of crime, of loss of wife, children, or fortune; perhaps of that silent wrestling with spiritual forces which is one of the most common and mysterious visitants of men in a state of education, wherein increasing knowledge battles eternally with increasing doubt and distrust of knowledge. Every man has had this black week in his life, ? a week of despair and the sick horror of defeat, of which, as I say, even the reminiscence can put out the sun, and keep one staring dully back into the desperate past until the fit is gone. And what a man experiences an army experiences: not as an agglomeration of men ? for to each homunculus of that mighty homo, an army, his own private happenings appear to bulk larger than the vast ones he shares in?but as a soul in itself compact of thousands of souls, all utterly subservient to the interests of the entity in which they are lost and whelmed. Much has been written of the unanimity of mobs in the street. It is as inferior to that of an army as disorder is to discipline, and is only better known because men sit in window-seats, pencil in hand, and quiz a mob wherever collected, whereas an army in action is far from window- seats, and its professional analysts, if it numbers any, are commonly too busy and absorbed to ply their curious trade. But in reality every man in the fighting-line is a moral sympieso- meter in himself if he only knew it. What he feels when the first shell bursts at dawn the whole army is feeling; the same at high noon, with its roar of battle and its heat; the same when the firing dies with the dying light in t...