midday
I spent the best part of my first night in South Africa in the streets looking in vain for a bedroom , and was helped at last by a kindly rickshaw Zulu to a shanty where I slept upon three chairs . I remember I felt singularly unwanted . The next day I set about my volunteering . By midday I had opened communications with that extremely untried and problematical body , the Imperial Light Horse , and in three days more I was in the company of a mixed batch of men , mostly Australian volunteers , on my way to a place I had never heard of before called Ladysmith , through a country of increasing picturesqueness and along a curious curving little line whose down traffic seemed always waiting in sidings , and consisted of crowded little trains full of pitiful fugitives , white , brown , and black , stifled and starving . They were all clamoring to buy food and drink -- and none seemed forthcoming . We shunted once to allow a southbound train to pass , a peculiar train that sent everyone on to the line to see -- prisoners of war ! There they were , real live enemies , rather glum , looking out at us with faces very like our own -- but rather more unshaven .