"The camels!" said the other man, and I looked at him, and he looked at me, and what there was in that shrouding darkness to tell each other what the other thought I do not know; but, as our frenzied horses waltzed and plunged away from the acrid fear behind them, we clung to our saddles with both hands, and rocked and choked with insane laughter. Later, when we met T----, leading a dead-lame pony out of the rocks, we broke out afresh, and between paroxysms, told him something of our admiring respect. Indeed, a man who could steer a madly racing pony through pitch darkness and over and between rocks, and at the same time conduct ably a rhetorical discourse on the (presumed) illegitimacy of camels and the moral degeneracy of men who ride upon them, well deserved some more tangible expression of merit than was held in mere words. Iron crosses have been given for less. The remainder of that ride left to us only recurring fits of laughter, dust, and noise and darkness, and when the camels came too near, which, in spite of concise injunctions to them to go "to another place," they often did, spasms of wrathful and sulphurous abuse. A note in my diary says of our return to Luderitzbucht: "Surprised to find myself looking on the beastly place as 'home!'" But was there real cause for surprise? (The narrator here begins to tell about "Alarums and Excursions" along the African deserts; a wild night ride; hunting the Germans like big game; and numberless anecdotes that put the African fever into one's blood.) FOOTNOTE: [8] All numerals relate to stories herein told--not to chapters in the book. LAST WORDS OF A "SOLDIER AND DRAMATIST" _Letters of Harold Chapin_ _An American Who Died for England at Loos, on September 26, 1915_