NATIVE IMPRESSIONS REGARDING THE WAR 137 
what was going on. The Catholics among them were 
more really interested in the papal election than in the 
war, during the autumn. “ Doctor,” said Joseph to me 
during a canoe journey, “ how do the Cardinals really 
elect the Pope ; do they take the oldest one, or the most 
religious, or the cleverest ? ” “ They take one kind of 
man this time, and another kind the next, according to 
circumstances,” was my reply. 
At first the black labourers felt the war as by no 
means a misfortune, as for several weeks very few were 
impressed for service. The whites did little but sit 
together and discuss the news and the rumours from 
Europe. By now, however (Christmas, 1914), the 
coloured folk are beginning to learn that the war has 
consequences which afiect them also. There being a 
shortage of ships, no timber can be exported, and there- 
fore the labourers from a distance who had been 
engaged for a year are being discharged by the stores, 
and as, further, there are no vessels plying on the rivers 
that could take them back to their homes, they collect 
in groups and try to reach the Loango coast, from which 
most of them come, on foot. 
Again, a sudden rise in the price of tobacco, sugar, 
rice, kerosene, and rum, brings home to the negro’s 
consciousness the fact that there is a war going on, and 
this rise is what gives them more concern than anything 
else for the moment. Not long ago, while we were 
bandaging patients, Joseph began to complain of the 
war, as he had several times done before, as the cause 
of this rise in prices, when I said to him : “ Joseph, 
you mustn’t talk like that. Don’t you see how troubled 
the faces of the doctor and his wife are, and the faces 
of all the missionaries ? For us the war means very 
