nets have adorned the prickly bushes of the waterless deserts. "Tuck
your mosquito net well in at night," so runs the Army Order. But what
does it profit him to tuck in the net when dysentery drags him from his
blanket every hour at night?

From the verandah of the hospital the soldier sees the hospital ship all
lighted up at night with red and green lights, the ship that's going to
take him out of this infernal climate to where the mosquitoes are
uninfected and tsetse flies bite no more. And there are no regrets that
the rainy season is commencing, and this is no longer a campaign for the
white soldier. On the sunlit slopes of Wynberg he will contemplate the
white sands of Muizenberg and recover the strength that he will want
again, in four months' time, in the swamps of the Rufigi. Now the time
has come for the black troops to see through the rest of the rainy
season, to sit upon the highlands and watch, across miles of intervening
swamp, the tiny points of fire that are the camp fires of German
Askaris.

Through the shady streets of this lovely town wander our soldier
invalids in their blue and grey hospital uniforms, along the well-paved
roads, neat boulevards, immaculate gardens and avenues of mangoes and
feathery palm trees. Along the sea front at night in front of the big
German hospital that now houses our surgical cases, you will find these
invalids walking past the cemetery where the "good Huns" sleep, sitting
on the beach, enjoying the cool sea breeze that sweeps into the town on
the North-East Monsoon.

Imagine the loveliest little land-locked harbour in the world, a white
strip of coral and of sand, groves of feathery palms, graceful shady
mangoes, huge baobab trees that were here when Vasco da Gama's soldiers