That was a question I had often asked myself since the day I enrolled as a signaller in the East African Mounted Rifles, locally known as "Bowker's Horse"--a deceptive nickname, for at that time we rode mules. We got horses later on, and uniforms and accoutrements all of a piece; but in the early days of the war we were an irregular corps of straight-shooting, cheery, undisciplined scallywags, wearing garments of our own devising, saluting or not as the notion occurred to us, and literally pawing the ground in our simple-minded anxiety to ride straight into "German East" and crumple up such slight resistance as we expected to meet. The corps was composed, for the most part, of settlers, a sprinkling of juniors from Government offices, an estate agent or two, and a leavening of those nondescripts who float round any new colony, to be inevitably washed up when any piece of adventure or devilry comes along. That was how we looked at it then; we were booked for the great adventure, and were prepared to start on it out of hand with our own rifles and ammunition and a few scrag-ends of mule. For some days after the declaration of war Nairobi looked as it does in race week, and I wonder someone didn't get killed in the crush at Mackinnon's Corner, where all the principal roads converge. White men, brown men, black men, motors, bicycles, and mules seethed about all over the crossing. Somalis would bring up a batch of mules to be passed by the vet., and those would kick and bite their way through the maelstrom, whilst our local scorchers, who had blossomed into motorcycle despatch-riders, added to the joy of things by coming down Sixth Avenue like streaks and jamming on both brakes when within a few feet of the crush. This pleased the mules, of course. It was an education to watch some of our bar-room buck-jumpers at play on the lightsome blend of fiend and whirlwind called a mule. There was a man in my troop called Eccles, who wasn't a "Buffalo Bill" at the best of times, and they served him out a mustard-crossed white mule that looked like some kind of loathsome slug. It kicked you when you tried to mount, and promptly bucked you off if you succeeded in getting on--a _perfect_ brute, in short.