3° 
BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA 
The dried stems and the dead fronds crash grown before this jarring blow. If 
the fruit does not fall and the tree is not tilted over at an angle [its crown within 
reach of the animal’s trunk], then the great beast will either strive to drag it 
down with his proboscis or to kneel and uproot it with his tusks The elephants 
pause every now and then in their feasting, the mothers to suckle the little ones 
from the two great paps between the fore-legs, a huge bull to caress a young 
female amorously with his twining trunk, or the childless cows to make 
semblance of fighting, and the half-grown young to chase each other with shrill 
trumpetings. 
But the moon is dropping over to the west. You did not think the moon¬ 
light could be exceeded in brightness. Yet in the advent of day it is only after 
all a betterment of night. Before the first pale pink light of early dawn the 
moonlight seems an unreality. In a few minutes the moon is no more luminous 
than a round of dirty paper and with the yellow radiance of day the elephants 
cease their gambollings and feasting, form into line, and swing into one of those 
long marches which will carry them over sixty miles of forest, plain and 
mountain to the next halting place in their seeming-purposeful journey. 
There has been a war. The black man trained and taught by the Arab has 
been fighting the black man officered and directed by the European and, not 
unnaturally, has got the worst of it. But the fight has been a stiff one. We 
have had to take that walled town in the red plain, behind which are gleams of 
water and stretches of green swamp interspersed with clumps of raphia palms. 
There has been the preliminary bombardment, the straw huts within the red 
walls have gone up in orange flame and mighty columns of smoke [transparent 
black and opaque yellow according to the material burning] into the heavens 
above and are now falling in a gentle rain of black wisps. Here and there 
a barrel of gunpowder has exploded, or the bursting of a shell has elicited 
a terrible cry from an otherwise stolid, silent enemy. Then there has been the 
first charge up to the clay walls and the inevitable casualties from the enemy’s 
fusillade directed through the loop-holes. A white officer has fallen forward on 
his face, revolver in hand, biting the dust literally. He is not dead, he announces 
cheerfully, “ Only my arm smashed, I think ” ; but a Sikh who is attempting to 
arrange for his transport to the doctor out of the range of the enemy’s fire, is 
shot through the heart, and with the last dying instinct swerves his fall to avoid 
falling on the officer’s shattered arm. The bulk of the small force of white 
men, Sikhs, and negro soldiers in khaki uniforms and black fezzes, has either 
scaled the clay rampart or has shattered a gateway and burst into the strong¬ 
hold, and the officer can now swoon away comfortably without much risk of 
dying, as the doctor can be seen in the distance hurrying up his little band 
of native hospital assistants and a couple of hammocks for the transport 
of wounded men. A tremendous rattle of musketry is going on. The native 
guns go off seldom now, but make a loud reverberating boom from the quantity 
of powder with which they are charged ; the Snider rifles, on the other hand, 
give short cracks. From some of the unburnt housetops in the more distant 
part of the town the enemy is still keeping up a dropping fire, and in fact as we 
stand in imagination over the wounded officer we can hear overhead that curious 
u ping,” that singing sound of bullets travelling high above our heads. We are 
not out of but under the enemy’s range. Gradually the gun fire ceases, though 
every now and then a few more cracking shots will be heard, until the victory is 
complete and absolute, and the place is wholly taken. 
