December 6, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
;ind with that I will conclude. This principle is the principle of 
secrecy, secrecy for the common good and with a military 
object. It makes the accounts of operations dull; it prevents 
the speaker or the writer from getting his " effect " ; it badly 
dims the limelight. Nevertheless, it is essential. The dift'ef- 
eme between success and failure, other things being equal, is 
the difference between your knowing more of the enemy than 
he kncAVS of you, or the contrary. 
It shows a strange lack of intelligence that men should com- 
plain of such a necessity even in detail. It should surely 
he evident that tiie smallest and apparently most insignifi- 
cant detail maybe just what the enemy's Intelligence Depart- 
ment reciuires in order to piece together evidence hitherto 
undecipherable. 
W'e have just liad in the field ohe of the very best examples 
— I think thebot inthewholewar—ofwhatsurprisecan effect. 
We owe it entiiely to the soldiers. One piece of vain talk 
by a politician, one uncensorcd line in an article pretending 
to prophesy, and the victory in front of Cambrai would have 
been ruined. It all pivoted upon the element of surprise. 
\\ hether it be possible to enforce those three principles — the 
incompetence of non-military advisers ; the necessity for 
maintaining the integrity of command, and the necessity for 
secrecy upon men whose whole mode of life is the antithesis 
of the soldier, it woijld be dithcult to say. But if the public 
will appreciate the importance of those things, then general 
opinion will have some remaining force and perhaps render 
the recent follies, of which we are all so ashamed, less frequent. 
H. Bei.loc 
Mr. Belloc, who has recently returned from France, 
will write a special article on the American Effort 
next week. 
Rhodes' Imperial Dream 
By Lewis R. Freeman 
The death of Si)\Slarr Jameson and the concluded campaign 
in German East Africa makes this comprehensive review 
of Central African railway construction very apropos. 
Dreamer devout, by \-ision led 
Beyond our guess or reach, 
The travail of his spirit bred 
Cities in place of speech. 
So liuge the all-mastering thought that drove — 
So brief the time allowed — 
Nations, not words, he linked to prove 
His faith before the crowd. 
HOW well these lines of Kipling epitomise the 
character of the men who strove so hard to teach 
the British Empire to " think imperially " it has 
taken the present war to bring home to the people 
<it that Empire. " So much to do, so little done," were the 
dying words of a dreamer passing with his dream but partly 
lulfilled ; for the uniting of the South African states, and the 
making that union an integral part of the British Empire 
was only the first step towards the ultimate bringing of the 
whole of East and Central Africa — from the Mediterranean 
to the Cape of Good Hope — under the British flag, and binding 
the several regions together with bands of steel by building 
a railway which should run from the mouth of the Nile to the 
Indian Ocean, on a " Red " map all the way. 
Fate was never more capricious than in the irony of her 
decree that it should be the very thing— the ruthlessness 
of Teutonic territorial ambitions — which appeared to Rhodes 
to make the fulltlment of his dream impossible, which has 
ultimately operated to bring that splendid conception within 
the range of imminent possibility. The way will be open for 
the ringing up of the curtain on the second and greater tableau 
erf Rhodes' " Imperial Vision " when the campaign in what 
was once German East Africa is finally finished. 
When Rhodes first " dreamed his dream " of the " Cape-to- 
Cairo " railway probably nobody knows, but it well may have 
been on the occasion of his first visit to the Victoria Falls of the 
Zambesi, some time in the eighties, when it is known that his 
mind was already busy with his " Union of South Africa " 
scheme. A friend of mine — a prominent American mining 
engineer who has spent many years in South Africa and 
been much in the company of Rhodes— related to me, on the 
occasion of my last visit to Johannesburg, an illuminative 
and prophetic incident in connection with the great man's 
first sight of Victoria Falls. He prefaced his account by 
mentioning that the natives of this region have long had a 
belief that in the heart of the great rainbow, which is formed by 
the drifting mist of " The Smoking Waters," may be seen 
visions of the future. The tribal witch-doctors, he said, went 
there to learn the issue of impending battles, and even the 
brave Scotch missionary and explorer, David Livingstone, 
professed to have seen taking shape in the iridescent mists a 
vision of a white man carrj'ing a lamp in the darkness — the 
Church bringing the Light "of Faith to the tribes of Africa, 
according to his interpretation. 
" We had trekked across to the Falls from Bulawayo," 
my friend went on, " principally with the idea of getting a 
line of the territory which was shortly to be named Rhodesia. 
It was the first time that all but one or two in the party had 
seen the great cataract, and for several days we had been in 
camp there, literally lost in the wonder of the most stupendous 
natural spectacle ever given to the eye of man to behold. 
" Rhodes, his mental activity seemingly stimulated by the 
i.lav of the primal forces, lived like a man in a dream, his 
mind evidently engrossed with his colossal schemes of Empire. 
His total obliviousness to all that was going on about him 
while thus wrapped in thought had already resulted in his 
being lost on several occasions, and it was on this Victoria 
Falls trip that those of us nearest him formed the plan — after- 
wards followed through all of his treks about the veldt — 
of never allowing him to wander beyond the sight of at least 
one armed white man. 
"This was how it chanced that, on the day I have in mind, I 
tailed on behind Rhodes when, just before sunset, he strolled 
absently away in the direction of the Falls. He walked aim- 
lessly for a while, with hands clasped behind him and head bent 
in thought — a characteristic attitude — but at the first touch 
of spray from the wind-blown drift of the ' Smoking Waters ' 
he seemed to shake off his lethargy, and started at a quicker 
pace along the path which led through the ' Rain Forest ' 
to the cliff above the ' Boiling Pot.' 
''Soon we were drenched to the skin (it is now the custom to 
wear waterproofs in the passage of the ' Rain Forest '), 
and as the sun-shot mist grew thicker little rainbows began 
forming about the birds and swaying trees and all moving 
objects and I saw Rhodes and his Kaffir boy walking, like 
saints of old, with slfining halos about their heads. 
"Out to the very verge Rhodes pressed, while I hastened 
to push up abreast of him lest he should fail to discern that 
the chff rim was the dead-line between vision and reality and 
step off into the mist-choked gorge. He started at the touch 
'of my hand on his arm, but — except for the fact that he was 
shouting above the deafening thunder of the waters — his 
manner was almost matter of fact as he roared : ' Thanks, 
S . Glad you came. Worth getting soaked for ? ' 
" Then, as his eyes wandered back to the sh^r 400-foot 
drop of the ' Leaping-Water Fall,' the far-away look that I 
knew so well returned, and he was off again with his dreams. 
Yet it was not to the white brocade of the face of the fall that 
he was looking, nor yet (where my own eyes were irresistibly 
drawn) into the boiling depths beneath, but straight across 
to the opposite cliff, where the largest and last of a long arch 
of a dozen or more rainbows spanned the gorge in vivid mother- 
of-pearl. 
" ' S -,' he thundered (he spoke without lowering his 
eyes, and I caught the words only by bringing an ear close to 
his lips and putting a hand over the other to shut out the 
roar of the Falls), ' Do you know that the Kaffirs claim that 
they can see far into the future by k)oking into the depths of 
that big rainbow ? No ? Well, they do.' 
" ' And what do you think I can see there at this very 
moment ? Two lines of shining steel — a railway — running 
from one end of .Africa to the other, and crossing this gorge 
right over there where the spray from the Falls will beat upon 
the faces of the passengers, just as it beats upon ours. 
" ' To east and west I can see branches running— maybe 
a dozen ; maybe a score — ^picking up business for the main 
trunk all the way from Cape Town to Alexandria. And 
look, S- , do you see that bar of red ? ' (Through the rain- 
bow glowed a segm.ent of dusky rose, where the light of the 
setting sun struck through the smoke of smouldering veldt 
fires). ' That means that it's going to be an " All Red " 
railway ; that it will run in British territory all the way ! [ 
"The piercing eyes under the beetling brows were shining 
as we turned to go, and I knew that tears of enthusiasm were 
mingling with the clinging mist of the ' Smoking WJaters.' " 
* * * A * 
That the railway Rhodes dreamed of was to be an " All 
British " route undoubtedly weighed more heavily with him 
