They picked no quarrel with me personally, for though I was roughly dressed, I had shown my Foreign Office passport to their superior, and I suppose they had been told to let me alone. But they talked at me as I sat there quite quietly pretending to read, talked about what a poor lot all “Englanders” were, anyway, and how only the worst of them ever came to Africa, and how they, the Germans, the salt of the earth, were bound, sooner or later, to take over the whole of it from the Cape to the Zambesi, and a lot of other balderdash, all in front of their admiring men. Then, as the beer began to work, they would start on D. about the British Army, what rank he held in it, if all the officers were like him, and so on till they got the little man rattled. Their crowning witticism would come when he dived down beneath the counter for more beer for them, when at a signal all four of them would bring their riding-whips down on the rickety counter, with a crash close to his head, to show their men “how an English officer could stand fire”! This never failed to bring down the house, and send me flying out before I got into serious trouble. How the man stood it beat me! It is true that these officers were subalterns only, but in any other army in the world they would have been cashiered, for never a day passed but that they were vilely and blatantly drunk in full sight of their men. Especially was this the case on the Sunday when they were celebrating the approaching departure of the veterinary surgeon for Germany, and when, at eleven o’clock in the morning, they reeled from their quarters arm-in-arm and staggering drunk. In the bar for the rest of the day they excelled themselves, and I again heard the toast of “The Day” being drunk, though I did not imagine, as I sat there with my hands itching, how soon that “Day” would come. Altogether, with the exception of the doctor, who was not so bad, they were a trio of contemptible, bullying cads, and I thanked God when my horse was at last pronounced to have passed the _mallin_ test, and I was at liberty to clear back over the border, to bad roads and tumble-down shacks, it is true, but to free air again, where a man could go and come as he liked, free from anything even remotely resembling the detestable junkerdom of this “Kolonial” edition of Prussianised Germany. Once back “home” in my gully I had to make immediate plans for a trip to Cape Town, not only to arrange for further development north, but to make preparations for working in German territory if needs be, which I believed could be managed better through the German Consulate-General in Cape Town than by a personal application in Windhuk. [Illustration: AN INTERNATIONAL BOUNDARY BEACON BETWEEN GERMAN (LATE) SOUTH-WEST AFRICA TERRITORY AND BRITISH (GORDONIA).]