"You mustn't believe all the wild beasts stories you hear," he would observe to the tenderfoot. "They are mostly frightful exaggerations." Then the nervous one would look up and observe a rhino gazing morosely at these intruders on the privacy of his own special tract of forest. The next moment the tenderfoot would be in the arms of a peculiarly inhospitable tree, wondering what was going to happen next. Certainly life in what the kinema posters call "Nature's Zoo" holds excitements of a kind unknown to the army in any other quarter of the globe. I used to think out problems unprovided for by the Hague Convention, such as, if a small British patrol met a small enemy patrol in thick bush, and at the same time flushed an angry rhino, what would be the correct procedure? Should the combatants combine to blot out the rhino, and then proceed with their own quarrel, or should they hurriedly retire and fight somewhere else? I never heard of any such contingency arising, but it easily might have done so, and it is certain that once, just as one of our patrols sighted a German patrol, a rhino charged our rear, and two of our men had to fall out to tackle it, whilst the rest fired on the Germans. Our first engagement was at Longido, in the first November of the war. Our regiment had a tough day, and lay for many hours under fire without food or water, but I am not out to write the story of that skirmish. It doesn't come under the heading of the humors of the campaign, although there was a certain grim humor knocking about all the same. Our men were so new to that sort of thing that it took them some time to realize they were under heavy fire, and just when the firing was hottest one of them was waving a toothbrush and asking, "Any of you chaps lost a toothbrush?" whilst another shouted, "Come over here, you fellows. Lovely shooting!" It was during the season that followed, when, as a correspondent of an English paper neatly put it, we "held the railway and shouted for help," that we realized the real, inner meaning of monotony. At first we expected to get going in a week, then we put the time forward to months, and finally we resigned ourselves. To live in standing camp for the rest of our natural lives, to do long patrol, short patrol, and "bait" patrol for ever and ever seemed the best we could hope of life. Letters arrived with some regularity, for we were then only some few miles over the border. Papers drifted through to us, and we knew more of the happenings in Europe than we did of our own campaign, though occasionally we gleaned some items of local interest from the English papers. It annoyed us to see an alleged illustration of one of our "scraps," in which smart-looking men on ramping horses were represented as fighting in open country at five hundred yards, whilst in reality it was done by untidy men on mules, in thick bush, at forty yards. The real thing was much better than the artist's conception of it.