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Page 12
It is difficult to write about Swakopmund. As a town it is the most
extraordinary place I have seen. I use the superlative deliberately.
But I do not wish to live there. It is purely artificial, and
artificial to a ghastly degree too. There is not a spot of vegetation.
There is not a genuine tree to be seen. The water has a detestable,
unsatisfying blurred taste, to which the adjective "brackish" is
applied. It is probable that a town occupied by enemy troops does not
look at its best; but the fact that it was under such conditions when I
first knew Swakopmund makes no important difference. The place in its
essentials must always be the same. If ever there was a work of bluff
Swakopmund is that thing. One fancies the German commercial expert, a
Government official, or, maybe, a representative of the ubiquitous
Woermann, Brock & Co., looking along this ferocious and awful coast for
a spot to found a town that should appear on the maps and be esteemed a
seaport. The Swakop River? Very well. Was there water there? But
certainly so; water obviously of the worst quality--yet water. Besides,
were there not always refrigerators and condensing machinery? Upon
which Swakopmund was forced into existence--planked down there bit by
bit in the face of circumstance. Walk a trifle over a thousand yards
from the edge of the changeful Atlantic through Swakopmund's deep sandy
streets and you get the key to the town. For it ceases utterly,
abruptly; from the door of its last villa, fitted with perfect
furnishings from Hamburg, the bitter desolation that is the Namib
Desert stretches away from your, very feet. Marvelling at this place, I
was particularly struck by the size of its cemetery. But I was not long
puzzled. If you strike Swakopmund on a fine sunshiny day you will be
pretty favourably impressed with the climate; it seems warm and
temperate, and the sun sparkles on the sea.
In a week or so you will learn to modify that judgment. More than half
the days we were at Swakopmund a heavy pall of dampness hung over the
place, and after a day or two of it one's system seemed to be badly
affected. Maybe we were not acclimatised, but the fact remains that a
very large proportion of us were down with a kind of dysentery,
attended by vomiting and violent pains in the stomach. Then there are
days when the winds blow from the desert--an indescribable experience.
They bring moths and flies with them, and great clouds of sand; it is a
genuine labour to breathe, and at noon and for two hours after the
temperature in the sun runs up into the "hundred-and-sixties."
Swakopmund is not a health resort; or perhaps we dwelt there in the
wrong season. But it is a monument to Teutonic determination. The
Germans willed this town there, planted it on the edge of the
wilderness; fitted it out, from bioscope theatre to church with organ
and electric organola; and they lived in it, with the climate of
perdition and all the accessories of a suburb of Berlin, and called it
a seaport. It is not a seaport; in a fair gale you can't land a barrel
of corks at the pier. But given time and they would have built in the
face of nature a two million pounds breakwater and everything complete.
Yes, they are a thorough people; they are human ants as regards work.
Nevertheless, it is not colonising. The Germans are not colonists.
Army Headquarters were fixed at the Damaraland Building close to the
shore--a splendidly equipped edifice, with a tower commanding a
fifteen-mile-radius view of the desert and the sea. General Botha made
the private quarters of the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief at the
Woermann Line House close by.
When we arrived at the northern seaport it had been in our possession
many weeks, but our troops were occupying the trenches just outside the
town, and from the Damaralands Building Tower our look-out and
signallers could see through the heat-haze the enemy's patrols moving
to and fro in the glistening sands beyond.
Whilst awaiting orders for an advance, life at Swakopmund was in some
ways quite good. There were two attractions: regimental concerts, when
sanctioned, and the shore. South Africa at war differs in great degree
from other parts of the world. The country has the germ in its blood.
Men who have campaigned before felt the stirring in them when the
South-West campaign started. The call for volunteers acted like a
magnet. All sorts and conditions of men were found with the Forces in
the South-West. Patriotism called them; but there called them also that
deep-seated spirit of unrest which prompts so powerfully when war drums
sound once again. I used to think Kipling exaggerated a trifle; now I
know the truth. At the concerts on the South-West front the most
astonishing array of talent was to be found. One such function in
particular stands out in mind. The stage was made up of army biscuit
boxes supporting rough planking outside a builder's yard in the deep
sand. At a borrowed piano belonging to some vanished resident a trooper
officiated; he was clothed in a grey back shirt and ammunition boots--
and displayed the daedal methods of a Fragson. Singers of every type
with every kind of voice, and perfectly trained, performed. Only later
did I learn that amongst the artists were half a dozen of the best
performers in Johannesburg. And at the foreshore, between fatigues,
drills, and spells of duty the fellows used to gather, to enjoy the one
luxury of Swakopmund--the surf-bathing. Here you would meet men upon
whom you never expected again to set eyes assembled literally from all
over South Africa from the Cape to the Zambesi. Belonging to one
regiment I met, in privates and corporals, six well-to-do farmers, a
handful of solicitors, bank clerks, a sub-native commissioner or two,
and the no longer youthful private secretary to one of the most eminent
semi-public companies in Africa. And there we all were cut off from the
outside world. Each evening we got an issue of the official Bulletin--
six square inches of paper thankfully received. For the rest we had no
change from the perpetual sound of the sea and the mournful note of the
bell-buoy that marks the inshore shoal. Its "dong-dong, dong-dong-dong"
created a perfect illusion of the call to a tiny church through the
country lanes of England. Everyone who was there can still hear the old
bell-buoy at Swakopmund.
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