With Botha and Smuts in Africa . bay. During the few days we were at Walfishwe had our first experience of the fly thought I knew something about flies, butnever have I seen anything to approach theWalfish brand. Inside the tents it is no ex-aggeration to say that you could not put afinger on the canvas without touching a for sheer pertinacity in annoyance I havenever met their equals. We tried every remedyknown but without avail—there was nothingto be done but to endure the plague with asmuch resignation as one could put into it. In the meantime orders came through thatI was
With Botha and Smuts in Africa . bay. During the few days we were at Walfishwe had our first experience of the fly thought I knew something about flies, butnever have I seen anything to approach theWalfish brand. Inside the tents it is no ex-aggeration to say that you could not put afinger on the canvas without touching a for sheer pertinacity in annoyance I havenever met their equals. We tried every remedyknown but without avail—there was nothingto be done but to endure the plague with asmuch resignation as one could put into it. In the meantime orders came through thatI was to proceed to Swakopmund, whereGeneral Botha had his headquarters, to discussthe disposition of the squadron in the comingadvance, so I left Nalder, my second in com-mand, in charge and went on to Swakop bymotor-trolley over the new railway. Why thevehicle kept on the rails for a hundred yards hasalways been a bit of a mystery to me, but itdid, and we bumped and banged over thetwenty miles in very little more than an hour. 16. GAPTE-^C 0 L ONY^l ., v inn ^okfbntiin The lBun»15T» SKETCH MAP OF SOUTH-WEST AFRICA e 17 CHAPTER III SWAKOPMUND AND THE GENERAL Approached either from Walfish by the rail-way or from the sea, Swakopmund reminds oneirresistibly of the White City. It is at oncewonderful and grotesque—wonderful in itsdemonstration of German thoroughness, gro-tesque in its evidence that that thoroughnessis of the sealed-pattern variety which says:Here we will build a town. Never mindabout anything else; we will see to it that itbe like other German towns. Swakopmund is a town of imposing build-ings, quite out of keeping with the countryin which it has been dumped down. In normaltimes it had a population of about 1,300 whitesand a post office that would have served a third-rate European city. The hospital—anotherexample of the sealed pattern—is large enoughto have served the whole white population ofthe Colony. Everything appears to have beendone on the same lavish
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