Events in the Two Lives of an
Anti-Jewish Camel-Doctor.
by
PREFACE
This autobiographical effort is in two parts: the first deals with my experiences until I retired from the Veterinary Profession in 1928; the second, with events in the political pioneering career that I carried on after that year by opposing the secret Jewish Power. It was not until 1946 that I thought seriously of publishing it. On reading one of the numerous "smearing" articles about myself in the political columns of newspapers, I learned that my career, "told in full, would read like an Oppenheim thriller", and then it struck me that although there was much doubt as to whether it was as bad as all that, there were possibly some rather unusual events in it which might interest the small proportion of the public that reads.
For political reasons I have not mentioned in this book the names of most of my friends; and I hope my readers will not, therefore, attribute the fact that the word "I" too frequently occurs in the text to any want of modesty on my part; a man who has been in prison, with or without trial, for well over four years isn't likely to overestimate his own importance! I think that there will be many lovers of animals, veterinary surgeons amongst them, who may find something new to them, particularly in the first ten Chapters; whilst anyone concerned with political realism can learn a little from the experiences related in the second part of the book, since those experiences are rather unique. This, however, is neither a veterinary textbook nor a political treatise; it is simply an account of some of the things that happened to Your Humble Servant,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.
I thank the Editor of Country Life for permission to use three of my articles in that magazine, viz.:— Camels: Fiction and Fact; Mule Sense; and Toreador in Teesdale.
I thank the Editor of Wide World Magazine for permission to use my article Bill of the Desert; and for kindly supplying the block for the photograph reproduced on Plate III (1).
The Author.
CONTENTS.
Chapter I. The Root of the Trouble ... 1
II. A Slow Starter ... 3
III. Into the Hard Cold World ... 8
IV. Bill of the Desert ... 12
V. Six Years of
VI. On the Equator ... 22
VIII. Camels: Fiction and Fact ... 35
IX. Mule Sense ... 38
X. Private Practice ... 42
XI. Political Awakening ... 48
XII. The Jewish War ... 61
XIII. The Cold War after the Hot One ... 70
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
Page Frontispiece. The Author.
Plate II. West Ham to Chingford Express ... 10
III. (1)
Bill 12
(2)
Ata Mahomed, Bill, and friend 12
IV. (1) Vultures after a postmortem
... 17
(2) On the Bridge of the Ship of the
Desert ... ... 17
V. One of the first cures of Camel-Surra 20
VI. Author joins up in World War I ... 27
friend 45
(2) With Nandy
II ... ... 45
VIII. The late H. H. Beamish ... ... 69
NOTE,
A
number of the original photographs from
which the plates were taken, had faded.
The Author.
BORN 1878 — DIED 1956
OUT OF
STEP
CHAPTER I.
The Root of the Trouble.
Surely, everyone who attempts to write an autobiography should give his readers an adequate ancestral background against which to judge him.
Heredity always seemed to me to be a far more important factor in the basic character-formation of the individual than mere environment; it is one's forebears who hand down instinct, and what is instinct but hereditary memory born of fundamental experiences of past generations?
I have been able, thanks to the collaboration of many distant relations, to
trace my ancestry through many generations. But, of the Leese family itself, I
have no knowledge beyond that of a great-grandfather, Joseph Leese, of
The Leese family runs to a type which evidently has a strong prepotency: both sexes are generally tall, fair, blue-eyed, with heads broader than the typical Nordic average: any Mediterranean mixture by marriage soon seems to lose any trace; the general run of the family is of good intelligence with a strong sporting trend.
The Scurr family derived from one of William the
Conqueror's Knights who was given
1
RICHARD OASTLER (1789-1861), the Factory King, the man who did the pioneering and rough street work in stopping the atrocious conditions under which child labour was then employed in the northern mills, a cause in which the Parliamentary activity was done by the Earl of Shaftesbury; Oastler's political enemies silenced him for a time by foreclosing on him for debt, and he was imprisoned in the Fleet for over three years; then his friends bought him out, and his return to Bradford was in the van of a procession a mile long. After his death, a bronze statue was erected in that town, with the simple inscription "Oastler", in which he is portrayed with two ragged children at his feet. Oastler was the grandson of the brother of my great-great-grandfather, Robert Scurr. I hope I may be excused for boasting such a slender relationship to so grand a man. Mr. Cecil Driver wrote a very fine biography of Oastler, naming it Tory Radical (Oxford University Press, New York, 1946).
My mother was daughter of Charles Hudson, Coroner of Stockport, and of a
sound Unitarian stock of
My uncle, Joseph Leese, was made a Baronet, having been Recorder of
Manchester and Member of Parliament (Liberal) for
2
CHAPTER II.
A Slow Starter.
My father was an artist, but he had a modest independent income on which he
reared a large family. As a young man, he was of immense muscular strength and
I still possess copies of photographs of him "in the raw", the most
striking of which is a back view showing a physique of broad sloping shoulders
and narrow waist which reminds me of nothing so much as a section of the
Cantilever Bridge across the Firth of Forth. He could lift, with one hand, a dumb-bell
weighing 160 lbs. and raise it at arm's length above his head. I remember how,
when the family removed from
My mother was a very beautiful woman, a fact which I usually have to keep to myself, otherwise people are apt to crack the old joke, leaning forward, looking interestedly into my face to say: "Then it was your father who was not good-looking?" Her life was devoted entirely to the family and she taught us all to be civilised. Her eyes were blue and her hair was dark. I don't think any of us really knew what we owed to her until after she was dead. My parents lived in several places in the north, and before I was born there were already one son and five daughters. My eldest brother, Joe, was not a typical Leese; he was a strange mixture of scientist and musician and, as he was 13 years older than I was, we were never of much use to one another. Later in life, I found him so different in temperament and outlook to myself, that I decided the best policy to avoid a quarrel was to avoid him, which I did; and thank God, we never did quarrel. After him, every year or two
3
there came a sister, until five had appeared on the
scene. Being thus so close together in age, they tended not to look outside the
family for companionship and I believe they were very happy together. Then came
a gap of four years and, at Lytham, in
I was sent first to a dame school, where I kicked a girl on the ankle and
was "kept in" for an hour, bellowing the whole time: later to a boys'
day-school which bored me stiff. Finally, I was sent to
My mother had to do the best she could; I was, myself, very slow to mature. It was unusual for a lad not to know
the facts of life at the age of fifteen; I was a very innocent lad. Thinking it
all for the best, she had me articled to a chartered accountant where I spent
nearly three rather miserable years in the City. Then I woke up, decided that
the totting up of the profits of others was not for me and, with the help of my
dear old grandfather, overcame my mother's
doubts and went into the
4
altogether to be written off as a loss; at least I got a fine training in two things: firstly, in sticking out a monotonous job; secondly, rapid and accurate casting up of figures. Both these, especially the first, have been of great use to me in after-life. To think that I once passed the Intermediate Examination for Chartered Accountants with Honours!
Whilst I was at the accountants' office (Messrs. Craggs, Turketine & Co.), my mother and the rest of the family were without a permanent home and I went to live as paying guest with Mr. W. H. King, in Hampstead; he was an ex-Public Works engineer pensioned from India and he was a fine man for me to be with in those days. There I met my ultimate fate in his youngest daughter, May Winifred, but she was only 12 years' old then! I think the only exciting experience I had in the City was when I got inside the police cordon during the great fire at London Wall; but great fires in London have since become common-place.
About this time, I became aware of the fact that I had been suffering from
astigmatism (with short sight) for many years. It is impossible now to make any
estimate of the extent of this handicap; it meant that I had gone about without
seeing a number of things which were within the range of normal sight, but
beyond mine. However, I have much to thank my parents for in possessing a
healthy body and an active brain. I had grown up well fed and had never known
real hardship, and during my holidays had covered a large area of England and
Wales; but I still felt that I had been sheltered too much and that I knew my
country a great deal better than I knew my countrymen. However, from the time I
began to go out "to see practice" in my vacations at the
I had a younger brother, John Scurr Leese, born ten years later than myself with no other children in between, my parents having increased the population over a period covering twenty-five years! He, of course, was even more isolated from the others than I had been; he grew up a typical Leese, broke the high-jump
5
record at his school and vanished for ever at Krithia, Gallipoli, where he was serving in the first World War as a private in the 6th Manchesters. When I look back, I realise that I hardly knew him: circumstances and difference in age prevented it.
When I was a small boy I had made a bet with my sister, Nora, that I would
neither drink nor smoke until I was of age: on my 21st birthday I claimed the
sum and was duly paid. These so-called abstemious habits were retained
throughout my life; during adolescence 1 was free from a drain on scanty
pocket-money for one thing and I grew up with sound heart and lungs, and never
missed a single Rugby Football match when at the Veterinary College, always
being able to play as hard in the last five minutes as I did in the first.
During these early days, I was quite unconscious of any feeling that I was
missing anything by abstention; I abstained because I could not see why I
should drug myself just because other people did, and I did not make a virtue
of it; if I had, at any time of my life, seen any tangible advantage in mild
indulgence both in tobacco or alcoholic "refreshment", I would have resorted
to these things; but to this day I have never been able to discover that anyone
was ever a whit happier or better for them, and, to put it bluntly, I think
both habits are just "damned silly" where ordinary healthy men and
women are concerned. I don't think I could ever have really afforded them, as I
had to make my own way from the time I was able to write the letters M.R.C.V.S.
after my name. What I have often resented were gratuitous hints from the
drugged that I must not consider myself morally superior to them because I was
a non-smoker and an abstainer, because I never did, at least on that account! I
wasn't morally superior, at all; I was just undrugged.
I represented the normal; they represented the abnormal, and whose fault was
that? Surely, not mine? That is how it seemed to me. To them, I was abnormal
and they were normal! I think history records that
the subjects, but I think that the bovine complacency with which John Bull allowed himself to be reduced to a second-class Power by engaging in a wholly unnecessary war in 1939 is partly explicable by these drug habits, which I think are superlatively silly.
CHAPTER III.
Into the
Hard Cold World.
Although I had, during my college career, a large number of temporary spells
of "independence" when working with veterinary surgeons in the
vacations, the Summer of 1903 brought my diploma and full professional status,
and the first thing I did was to become an Assistant to a firm of Veterinary
Surgeons, Messrs. Batt & Sons, of Oxford Street,
London. In those days, there were few cars, and
The two assistants took on the night-work on alternate nights, and there was
plenty of it, too. Those were the days when people drove to theatres in
broughams and on cold nights horses would catch colds waiting for their owners
to emerge from places of entertainment. I had a telephone just over my bed, and seldom it was when it did not ring at least once on my duty nights. But I kept a spirit lamp and
kettle ready, and could always make myself tea whilst dressing to go out to a case. When the off-duty nights came,
I could leave work at
I often wonder how the modern veterinary student can ever
become a good horse clinician in the absence of the huge equine population that gave us of the old school such experience. A good equine practitioner was rather like a specialised Sherlock Holmes, who could take in all sorts of observations whilst hardly knowing he did it, and come swiftly to a correct diagnosis or prognosis. It was always the clinical work that interested me more than the scientific side; I liked to be with the animals and to study them so that no detail escaped me: veterinary patients seldom tell lies, but it takes close detective training to appreciate fully and quickly the meaning of their various signals of distress. I believe I was a good horse clinician; I was also strong on what I called "acrobatic surgery", which consisted of performing some slight surgical operation and springing out of reach before the animal had time to realise that anything had been done to him. I was only caught twice in my whole life: once when a horse kicked me just above the knee and once when a cow nearly tore my ear off with a hind foot. I always liked practice with dogs and cats, chiefly because I loved the animals themselves. Nowadays, a practice like Batt's then was, is simply unknown anywhere: so much have times changed!
After nearly a year of this, I was offered a much better job in the East End
of London, managing a practice for a deceased veterinary surgeon's executors in
West Ham, with a branch at Chingford, in
habit probably formed as the result of fright or ill-treatment when being broken in. Anyhow, tact eliminated it. The pony was so valuable in other ways that an occasional. new shaft was a detail: you could not tire her, even with thirty-five miles, and in Walthamstow and Leyton, when coming back from Chingford, we often overtook and passed the electric trams of that day, and we must have been a remarkable sight "going hell for leather", with the trap full of dog-patients for our infirmary at West Ham.
In the East End of London, the chief event of life in some classes of the inhabitants seemed, to use an Irishism, to be one's funeral. Big Flemish black horses were imported for use in these: they came in as three-year-olds and went straight to their work at that age; they could stand it, because, of course, they never really did any hard work at all. Sometimes I had to examine these new purchases as to soundness and the only way to test their wind was to drive them up a long hill in a hearse! These animals are very soft-hearted in sickness; the same remark applies to the popular Percheron horse; these continental horses definitely have a different sort of courage as compared with our native breeds. As an equine clinician. I found this interesting; I do not understand why it should be, but I know that when I am dealing with a Flemish horse or a Percheron, I can discount certain signals of distress which would be sinister signs in a Shire. For instance, after a bout of colic, the foreign horses will anticipate another attack by betraying certain symptoms of pain when no pain exists and no further attack is coming, moreover. The equine practitioner can always tell these cases by a brief examination of the pulse. The English horse goes back to the manger soon after the pain leaves him, nuzzling about for food.
In those days,
10
Plate II. West Ham to Chingford Express.
I then decided that the motor-car would oust the horse within my professional
life-time and that the prospects in horse-practice were not good enough for a
man who had a competence to make. I had about £400 saved and I determined to
take a post-graduate course at the
I had brought away from West Ham a bull-terrier pup named Bill; he was destined to be my closest companion for several strange years and deserves a chapter to himself.
11
CHAPTER IV.
Bill of the Desert.
Reprinted
from "The Wide Wide World", February
1949,
by kind permission.
Bill wouldn't have taken a prize at any serious dog-show. All the same, he could never have been mistaken for anything else but a bull-terrier. His mother was the most ferocious specimen of the breed that I have ever met with and was kept (usually on the chain) by a West Ham publican from whom Bill was purchased at two years' old for one pound sterling.
He grew into a formidable, but sweet-tempered dog, active and strong, with plenty of bone, well furnished with muscle. As from the first he lived with me day and night, he became—well, just what a dog of that sort naturally becomes to a man who had yet no other love.
The first year of his life was realty uneventful, except that when we moved
from West Ham to Vauxhall, he broke out next morning and disappeared. He came
back in the evening; but we found he had actually been as far as
After two months of Vauxhall, I went out East to investigate camel diseases
for the Indian Government and, of course, Bill came, too. We went out in the
hot weather, an unusual season in which to send newcomers out to
There followed a punishing train journey from
12
Plate III. (1) Bill
Plate III. (2) Ata Mahomed, Bill,
and friend
after the stifling days of dirty travel by rail and
road through the mid-summer hell of the Indian plains. The man did that all
right but left him in the sun and cold wind to dry. The result was that Bill
went down with rheumatic fever. I and a fellow-veterinary friend worked night
and day for ten days on a patient who could not move without a squeal of agony
and who could do nothing for himself. Somehow, we got him through, but it was a
very weak bull-terrier that went down to the plains with me and then back into
the hills to the Veterinary Research Laboratories, 7,500 feet up in the
Here I was calmly informed that dogs were not allowed it our living quarters to which I replied, with some heat, that I had not come from civilisation to mid-Asia to be separated from my dog, and the matter dropped.
Soon after, I got carte blanche to get on with my job, so down we went into the
plains, which we rarely left again. My work was field research in the most empty parts of North-West
Bill and I suffered about equally from the dry heat, but it was he who rushed out into the first downpour of the Monsoon racing and splashing through the puddles uttering squeaks of joy in the sensation of being cool at last.
Bill's travelling life was full of incident. One nuisance was experienced in the habits of pariah dogs. These ownerless curs, of all sizes, have regular beats like policemen in the villages they infest. No stranger dog can encroach upon another pariah's beat, which usually provides offal for the bare existence of one dog only. If a stranger dog is sighted, the pariahs of a village unite to liquidate him. Thus, when Bill, rolling along by the side of the baggage-camels, with tongue lolling, approached a village, one might see converging upon him a number of streaks of dust, indicating the rapid advent and onslaught of the pariahs of the place. Bill hardy ever started a fight, but was good at finishing one. Not for Bill the tactics of the pariah and the wolf—slash and break away! Singling out the most formidable opponent, he took hold and stayed where he held, using his weight as perhaps his mother had taught him.
13
His tactics defeated dogs twice his size, like the big Pathan sheep-dogs of the North-West Frontier. It was the foot of his opponent to which he attached himself as soon as he could. Then he would worry and pull away with his compact weight so that his antagonist could never close with him. It was wicked to see, but it is passing strange how he learned this trick; did he discover it by accident, or did he think it out? Occasionally, when he had a number of opponents, he got badly gashed, and I was always on my guard for the first signs of Rabies which happily never arrived.
Sometimes, when we crossed rivers, I would take Bill up on the saddle with me, but more often he swam them himself alter we had crossed.
Bill was a fearless, but tactful guard. The presence of Bill in my tent allowed me to sleep soundly in lonely places along the North-West Frontier which he and I travelled from Shabkadar to Dera Ghazi Khan.
Once he was lost in the desert. I had gone ahead on a riding-camel and
arrived at a well (our destination) several hours before the baggage-camels
with which were my servants in charge of Bill. My bearer, greatly agitated,
reported that Bill had disappeared ten miles back where there was thick scrub
in the desert: "chasing a pig," he said. It looked black for Bill.
Fortunately, I had a good map; after considering the position, I found there
were two other wells within twenty miles from the approximate place where Bill
had gone off. With a sinking heart, but somehow banking on the dog's
intelligence and instinct in making for water, I sent a camel-man to each of those
wells with instructions to wait all night and start back at
Bill's relations with camels were always friendly, though sometimes wanting in delicacy. On rare occasions, at the eastern end of our immense "beat", he met with elephants; unfamiliarity with these monsters made him aggressive and noisy, so, as he was quite without fear, it was considered a wise prophylactic measure to remove him as early as possible from their vicinity.
My bearer had a monkey; a quaint fellow who would jump from any reasonable height, say, the top of a bungalow, into my arms where he liked to sit, peering expectantly, from time to time, up my nostrils. Sometimes, after I had been cooling myself in the bath-tub, the monkey would take my place, swimming round and round under water and coming up occasionally to breathe. When
14
he came out, with his hair plastered down over his skull, he reminded me irresistably of a certain old acquaintance called—well, never mind! After the first tactful introduction, Bill accepted the monkey as "one of us"; he treated it as he would a human child, which he probably thought it was. He liked to feel the busy investigating fingers in his coat, and only mildly remonstrated when they pressed open his eyelids when he wanted to sleep.
In that half-wild life, even Bill's dinner wasn't always safe. Once he was discussing a bone in front of the tent, but had not observed the presence of two crows in a tree close by. One of these alighted a yard in front of Bill's nose, inviting inevitable attack, which Bill at once jumped forward to make, dropping his bone. In a flash, Crow No. 2 swooped on the bone, and the two cunning villains went off to share it together. One could not help admiring them for their sporting co-operation, so exquisitely timed.
Mahomedans are taught by their religion to regard dogs as unclean animals. However, my chief Veterinary Assistant, Ata Mahomed, a devout Mussalman and a kindly and observant lover of animals, saw something in Bill that wasn't written in the Koran. He loved him and would sometimes squat on the verandah with his arm round him, talking to him.
After about two years of this sort of life, I woke up one night with a
start, feeling something was wrong. It was. Bill was not on the bed. I lit the lantern and found
him under the bed, hardly conscious; he died five minutes later. I expect it
was valvular trouble, a legacy of the rheumatic
fever. He took a bit of me with him, I think. It was Ata Mahomed
who arranged his burial, and even photographed it for me to see afterwards; it
was Ata Mahomed who had a grave dug which was so
engineered with stones that the most clever jackal
could never penetrate it. There we left Bill of the Desert with a stone to mark
the place—"for ever
And I went on, alone.
15
CHAPTER V.
Six
Years of
My job was the investigation of camel diseases; it was unusual to send men out to India to arrive in the middle of the hottest season, and as soon as I reached Lahore in the Punjab, I was instructed to go up into the "hills" (the Himalayas) for two months, and spend my time learning Hindustani and also reading up anything that was known about camels and their principal plague, Surra or Trypanosomiasis. This I did and passed my Lower Standard language examination at the end of the time. I was destined for work far from the haunts of white men, and it would have been quite useless to go into the wilds with anything less than this very minimum qualification.
Then I was sent to Kathgodam, at the foot of the
hills below Naini Tal, to study Surra
which affected the
After a brief stay in the Muktesar Imperial Laboratory, magnificently situated 7,500 feet above sea-level right opposite the first great wall formed by the mass of the Himalayan mountains, I
16
Plate IV. (1) Vultures after a postmortem.
Plate IV. (2) On the Bridge of the
Ship
of the Desert.
OUT OF' STEP
left for the
I spent the cold weather getting all the experience I could with my strange new patients and decided that my most active days would have to be between the months of June and October, just when the plains were most unbearable; the reason was that Surra spreads only during that season in most parts of the Indian camel-country, although the sick animals may carry the disease from one season to the next, thus acting as reservoirs for the Tabanus to tap at the beginning of its season. This was not altogether a pleasant prospect, and was complicated by the fact that most camels go far into the desert at that season and are all the more difficult to get at. But my teeth were in the job, and I was immensely interested.
Postmortem work on camels which had died from unrecognised
causes was, of course, a fruitful source of information, but there were great
practical difficulties to be overcome, and sometimes when an outbreak of some
camel-disease had occurred, I would travel even hundreds of miles (by rail and
in the saddle) to arrive at the scene before the fierce sun had made conditions
impossible. Often, after we had finished an autopsy, we would look round to
find seemingly the whole population of North-West
It was often necessary to examine the blood of as many as a hundred camels at a sitting under the most appalling conditions; the blood was easily obtained by squeezing a drop out of a very slight nick in the ear of the animal on to a slide. The microscope had, sometimes, to be on the ground and I am surprised that no great injury appears to have resulted to my eyesight in this trying work in the blinding glare of an Indian sun.
17
OUT OF STEP
I soon took a dislike to the social conventions which ruled station life in
India, but as all my work was in the jungle and desert, I rarely stayed more
than a couple of nights in a city, staying just long enough to take in a fresh
stock of stores for another long trip in the "out back". Travelling was by horse or camel, and I soon reduced my
baggage to a minimum which surprised some of the other officers I met on tour.
I had two assistants, graduates of the
I arranged that the next Surra season should be spent in a known zone of the disease and that the principal work should be done with the use of ponies; ultimately the road from Saharanpur to Dehra Dun was chosen and I secured the use of a forest bungalow at Mohand, just where the highway entered the Siwalik hills. This place was known to be pretty certain death for tongs-ponies at that season. I arrived some time before the monsoon would bring out the flies, partly so that I could make a proper comparison between the fly conditions in the dry heat and those in the damp, but partly so that I could buy some ponies, build a stable and prepare mosquito nets on a large scale to protect certain of the ponies. We took several camels with us, which had chronic Surra; this to make sure that a source of infection would be present; and we had a number of white rats and white mice on which to investigate the various kinds of biting-flies' transmitting powers. As the place was very malarial, being surrounded by thick jungle full of all sorts of wild beasts, including elephant and tiger, I arranged a bamboo cubicle which, when covered with mosquito netting, enabled me to have my meals and evenings in peace. I did no shooting: I dislike killing animals except for food, and my business there was to do work. I used to keep fit by long walks with my bull-terrier companion.
18
OUT OF STEP
To cut a long story short, we proved that ponies protected through the whole Surra season by mosquito netting, yet otherwise in close contact with Surra-infected animals, remained free from the disease, whilst all the unprotected ponies contracted it. We also obtained a lot of information as to the relative capacity of the different genera of biting-flies to transmit Surra from one animal to another.
Armed with this definite knowledge, I returned to the
Everything pertaining to the proper management of the camel, his breeding
and feeding, down to the identity and seasonal value of the bushes he grazed
upon, was my business. In the first few Surra
seasons, I was travelling light through the monsoon
in the steaming plains when men who considered themselves luckier were
recuperating in the hills. I had to cover as much ground as possible so as to
detect the different areas which were reasonably safe from Tabanus
so that Camel Corps men could use them for grazing their animals in the Surra season. This work took me very far afield and there are few of the desert areas in
19
OUT OF STEP
centre and I had to live in tents until, at last,
they did. It was known at this time that certain arsenical drugs were capable
of banishing the trypanosomes from the blood of animals, although after a few
days' absence they would return: in some species of animal there had been
occasional cures. With such drugs as were then available, it was almost a case of
finding out how much and by what method the trypanosome could be finally killed
without damaging the animal patient. This monotonous work, however, was tackled
and in 1910, by a fairly long treatment, we had 50 per cent. cured by certain
treatments; similar results were being obtained in
Needless to say, when I became entitled to some leave, I was very ready for
it. By this time, I had decided that I would not stay in
20
Plate V. One of the first cures of Camel-Surra.
OUT OF STEP
great professional advantage; I left
The Indian Government had been ready to employ me in investigation work on
elephants, a job which I might have found attractive had I been fresh from some
temperate climate. But I felt that it would be difficult to become expert on
such a subject unless I could live on the job for at least three hundred years,
and as this wasn't likely, and I had no desire to leave a job on which I really
was expert to take on one at which I could not see how an ordinary lifetime
could provide enough experience to get one out of an amateur status, I decided
I would stick to camels. I foresaw intense interest in comparing the camel conditions
in other countries with those of
21
CHAPTER VI.
On the Equator.
When in
Before sailing, I visited the King family who were then at Southsea, and became engaged to my old friend, May Winifred
King; and it was intended that as soon as I had found my feet in
However, God disposes and things turned out differently. When I arrived at
Jubaland is truly Godforsaken, and the equator itself runs through it close to the mouth of the River. It is hot at all seasons and low-lying; it is malarial wherever desert conditions do not obtain. Most of it is desert, but the track to the north is never far from the river. It was no place for a white woman. Up-country life had to be lived in ramshackle wooden huts, and the only produce of the desert was livestock. On the other hand, there was game in plenty and on tour one shot one's own meat-supply. The menu
22
OUT OF STEP
could be dik-dik (a small
antelope about the size of a whippet), guineafowl, junglefowl, bustard, partridge, duck (where there were
lakes from the river-overflow in the rains), and sandgrouse,
which could be got at
The frontier was patrolled and guarded by the King's African Rifles, and
there was a mounted unit on camels about 100 strong, the men being Sudanese
chiefly, recruited from the defeated enemy at
The riverbank was infested with tse-tse flies for
a stretch of about 300 miles between Yonte and Selagli and all camel-transport had to be hurried through
this part of the route north, often doing 30 miles at night between 6 p.m. and
6 a.m. during which time the tse-tse is considerably
less active than in the morning after dawn or the evening before dark. The sun
rose at
I was never very happy during the 18 months I spent in this country; I had
not "clicked" with my superior, at
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camel had to take first place, and the necessary night-marching was very hard on the human element. I did so much turning night into day myself that when I left Jubaland, at the end of 1914, I slept very badly at night nearly all through the First World War. This work was preventive and not of enormous interest, but I derived a good deal of professional information from the many opportunities I had in comparing the conditions I observed with the Indian ones I had left behind.
On one occasion I was travelling up the right bank
of the
I spent several months at a forsaken spot called Serenli, 400 miles from the coast when you travelled on the river, and joined the expedition of Brigadier-General Hoskins when he went right on into the Marehan country to try and talk the natives there out of the necessity for a military expedition to make them behave. Whilst Hoskins did the talking, I was quietly surveying the routes for the future expedition if it were found unavoidable. Thus, the expedition could take place with the minimum camel-loss from Surra.
However, Hoskins made no great impression upon the Mare-
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han, and the expedition
was decided upon. I was sent right down to the coast where I had to arrange the
landing on an open beach, at Kismayu, of 350 camels
of an Indian Camel Corps which was to take part. The Commanding Officer, the
Native Officers and many of the men in this Camel Corps had known me well in
I had a row with the Government at this time, having received peremptory
orders from my Chief to join the expedition as Veterinary Officer. My status
being Civilian, with no provision for the possibility of my becoming a
casualty, nor any definition of my rank in a Military Expedition, nor any
certainty of my status as to discipline, I refused this order unless it was
first agreed on all sides that I was a civilian and nothing but a civilian and
would take no orders from anyone as to my work, but only as to my movements.
There was a lot of bobbery about this, but I got my
way; I was always anxious to accompany the expedition because of my friends
from
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at one camp, that from a pool in which a dead
ostrich had been lying. These things had told on my strength in such a climate
as Jubaland, and I became very feverish on the march
about 100 miles from the coast and had to be left behind; my face was so
swollen that my eyes were almost closed; I do not know what the condition was:
I had to be carried back to the coast on a stretcher by natives where, under an
Indian doctor, I made a slow, but complete, recovery. This was at a place
called Gobwen on the sandy banks of the
On landing at
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Plate VI. Author joins up in World War I.
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removed from the tse-tse
country, where they really had no business to be. After two months' service in
the Serengetti "desert" (not really desert
as we camelmen knew deserts) I received instructions
to take the camels back to Jubaland. This I did,
returning on the same ship and demanding my release according to the agreement
made. After some humming and hawing, I received my discharge, and took the
first available ship, a French one, to
But the War Office, in
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CHAPTER
The First Great Slaughter.
I was glad to get away from under the tropical sun; I felt that it had been affecting,
at last, my energy and initiative. I went to see my future wife and my mother;
and joined straight up in the Royal Army Veterinary Corps; I was rather
disappointed to be offered a mere Lieutenant's commission, but felt it was
hardly a time for holding out for terms! Anyhow, I was made Captain after nine
months' service. I was in
After a few weeks, we moved off, one night, down to the neighbourhood of Bethune, and the following day we heard that our last position had been laid flat by shelling. Here we stayed a long time; the batteries were, of course, up nearer the line; ammunition was very short at this time and our heavy horses were sometimes called upon, in pairs, to take up four rounds at a fast trot, which did them no good. At this place I remember seeing the
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(then) Prince of Wales marching with his regiment; and the Canadians would come down from the fighting line bringing their customary one white-faced prisoner to show where they had been. I had a lot of Units to vet at this time, and my professional rounds took me over a lot of ground. I spent Christmas Eve in the trenches with the Officers of one of our Batteries at Annequin and it was from an observer's post that I first saw the Germans with whom we were at war.
Veterinary work at the front in war-time is not very satisfying to the clinician, because prevention is his job, and he has to send all trouble to the rear to be dealt with by others. Detection of trouble at an early stage is the chief duty, but I used to treat some cases myself if I thought the delay in sending them back would prejudice their recovery.
Our Medical Officer at that time was a
After one year of service, I got leave and went home to be married. On my
return to
During my long stay in this Hospital, I was skilful enough to evade every Church Parade; there was always a sick horse to be attended to, just at the right moment! I always felt that Church
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Christianity was quite incredible; I am the son of a Unitarian mother and I believe that different races require different religions.
On one occasion Major Hobday, who was a high-grade
Freemason, announced that a Freemasonic meeting was going to take place in the
Unit and I realised that I was the only officer there
who was not a Freemason. Now although I was not a regular army man, I had been
long enough in contact with regulars in
Meanwhile, the British attack on
I was instructed to proceed to Hargeisa, not far from the Abyssinian border, and buy camels there. I had with me an Arab interpreter whose loyalty I had reason to doubt. At Hargeisa, I
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found that no camels were coming in for purchase,
so I called a meeting of akhils or headmen. Sitting
on a chair, I told these people to gather around in a semi-circle so that they
could hear the King's Message. I explained the need for camels in the war
against the Turks in
That ended the "ring". From that moment, I was able to buy an
average of 30 good camels a day for over three months; occasionally a feeble
attempt was made to form a fresh "ring" to send up the price, but I
broke these by saying I was well paid for my job and the longer they delayed me
in selling their camels, the longer I should be away from the carnage in
Europe. In the East, it is safe to appeal to the baser instincts of man. I
bought 3,500 animals at Hargeisa and Mandera, whilst the other three officers had collected
1,500 between them. Towards the end of the time, Major Herring-Cooper returned
to
By the time the last transport arrived to take us up the
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night. The instinct of mules in the direction of self-preservation is very strong: when suddenly dumped into deep water, they will try and climb upon anything that is afloat. There was not much afloat except men, so the mules tried to climb on them! My narrator said: "The night was dark and yet the water seemed to be all ears and teeth". A vivid description! Yet he went on, with tears in his eyes, "When a destroyer at last picked me up, one fellow rode up to the ladder on a swimming mule and when we moved off several mules were streaking after us trying to catch us up."
War is a beastly thing for animals as well as men.
When I felt like it, I reported my hitherto forgotten presence, and was told to join a transport for Marseilles, which I did, the only adventure on the journey being the appearance of a submarine, upon which our two escorting destroyers quickly enclosed us in a smoke-screen within which we changed our course and took temporary refuge in the bay where St. Paul was said to have been wrecked in Malta.
On returning to Abbeville, I applied for a spot of leave, but I was not one
of the General's "grey-haired boys" and was directed to take up
special duty at
One incident there might interest horsey men. My inspections of the horses, as they landed, was carried out
in the old moat around the ancient walls of
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were after him not to frighten or hustle him, and I got close to the spot where he would land, for he was looking down, snorting and fidgetting for a foot-hold. The height was about 25 feet, but the lauding was grassy and favourable. Then he jumped, and what interested me was to see quite plainly that although a horse taking an ordinary jump lands on his forelegs, this fellow, jumping from a great height, dropped his hind-quarters whilst in the air so that he landed on his hindfeet, thus breaking the shock. He was quite unhurt.
When this duty was done, I got leave and my wife and I went home together.
On my return to
The officers of the Unit itself were Royal Army Service Corps men, all selected for their jobs because of familiarity with horses, and they were very pleasant people for a veterinary surgeon to work with. On slack afternoons, which were rare, we would have an imaginary fox-hunt over the downs around Abbeville, with an imaginary fox and imaginary hounds. The purpose of the unit was to replace casualties from the front, our horses being conditioned, trained and paired as requisite, ready for supply.
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One day, a bright young red-hat from the Veterinary Staff came over to inspect my work. He asked me whether I saw to it that crushed oats were used so that the horses could get the most benefit from their corn. I said: "No, Sir" and he waxed eloquent on my oversight. When he had finished his tirade, I said, "Excuse me, Sir, but no horse leaves this depot unless he himself carries in his mouth the most efficient corn-crushing armament; trained men inspect every animal's grinders and if there is anything wrong with them, it is at once put right; further, if you will excuse me, Sir, these animals will not get crushed oats at the front and if they got used to eating them here, they would fall away quickly when they got up to the front where their work was hard and the corn fed whole." After that, I was left alone to do my job without interference.
There was a tense moment when the huge unit, which had been for years at
Abbeville, got orders to get ready to move to the coast at two hours' notice.
The Germans were in
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Camels:
Fiction and Fact.
Reprinted from "Country Life",
permission of the proprietors.
Nearly every popular tradition about camels is without factual basis and how many fables there are concerning the strange specialised animal met, in this country, only in zoos and menageries! If it were not for our native mud, he might have been a familiar domesticated worker here, provided he received stabling in the winter and reasonable protection from flies in the Summer, but even then some tall stories might have survived, because there are people who still believe that the horses's eyes magnify what they see, and that that is the reason he submits to Man! The horse is protected from flies by a special muscle attached to the skin itself which shakes them off and by his naturally long tail. The camel has no such defences and soon becomes exhausted by the muscular effort needed to beat off swarms of flies. That is one reason why the camel lives in dry climates.
Man's chief interest in the camel is in the work he can do. The structure of the camel's foot is specialised for sand; it has a flat horny under-surface with an elastic spread, but offers no grip on a slippery medium like mud. If a loaded camel is taken carelessly over a patch of slimy ground, the legs are liable to slip apart, and he does "the splits"; he may, if lucky, get off with a bad sprain; if unlucky, he will dislocate a joint. So he is useless in a country like ours, although he could stand the cold well enough.
Exaggerated notions exist of the camel's capacity to resist thirst; it is great, but the camel, even if he doesn't look it, is, after all, flesh and blood. There are certain antelopes which exist throughout the year without access to spring or river water, but they don't have to do work under those conditions. The working camel always thrives best when he can drink as often as he wishes, but if the necessity arises, he can keep going and remain fit on intervals between drinks of two to five days, according to the breed of camel. He can endure and survive privation of water for a much longer period, but will then suffer and will need plenty of time for recuperation.
Perhaps the tallest of travellers' yarns about the camel is the
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one which alleges that when lost in the desert and in danger of dying of thirst, a man may find relief by killing his camel and finding the bag of water which he is supposed to carry in his stomach. It would be much better to spend the time and energy in trying to find water somewhere else. There is no such supply maintained in the stomach; there is an excess of mucus in parts of the first stomach, but to suck some of that would act as an emetic and you would lose more water than you gained. The camel's specialised apparatus against thirst consists of an excess of mucus-secreting surface in the throat and in the first stomach, which enables him to moisten his food in chewing the cud, even if he hasn't had a drink for a week or so.
The camel's hump is a store of superfluous fat which is drawn upon when food
is scarce; it is relatively bigger and more efficient than the hump of the Zebu
ox, or the "spread" of a middle-aged man which may be a similar
provision of Nature so that he can tide over the longer intervals between
successful hunts as his activity declines; a pleasant thought, even if it may
not be accurate! The sheep in some countries similarly store fat in their tails
and I have seen a Doomba sheep, in
The camel's supercilious expression is accounted for by the Arabs who say that, while they know only 99 names of God, the camel knows the hundredth!
Sometimes it is stated that a camel-bite will give syphilis to man, but this
is untrue. The only disease which can be transmitted in this way is Rabies; a
keeper in
The dental armament of a male camel is terrific, because his four canine teeth are developed as fully as those of a lion, and he has been known to take the top of a man's head right off. The bite is always serious, and generally septic.
Camels are supposed to curl up and die out of sheer cussedness. Of this they are never guilty; they are full of a passive sort of pluck. The source of this tale lay in the unrecognised existence
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of a widespread disease due to a trypanosoma which causes a very slow decline with a remittent fever, which many camelmen were unable to diagnose or understand. The camel "curled up and died" from it because of his refusal to give in to it before expending the last ounce of his strength. It is pleasant to record that a hundred per cent. cure of this disease can now be effected by a single injection into the jugular vein costing (before the war) about 3s. 6d.
Another yarn is that a camel cannot swim. He can, and does, although he is slow in the water. I have landed hundreds of camels on an open beach by having them lowered into the water in slings by a crane, releasing the slings and making the camels swim ashore. Camels are much heavier in front than they are behind, and so the hind-quarters ride near the surface of the water. Therefore, as they approach a shelving beach and get their forefeet once more on terra firma, they bob about in a most absurd fashion for many yards before they can resume their normal dignified gait, as they cannot at first get their hind feet down.
In the Delta country of the Indus, there are camels which graze in the mangrove swamps and live a most uncamel-like and amphibious existence, swimming from one part of their water-logged grazing-ground to another; fresh water has to be brought to them from up-stream in boats!
Then, it is said that camel-riding makes people sea-sick. At the walking pace, it might, but one does not use riding-camels at the walk. With horses, the best travelling is done by alternate walk and canter, except when they are "pacers" or "ramblers"; but riding-camels are used at the jog or amble, and are never walked except on steep slopes or slippery mud. With riding-camels, you plug along all the time, with halts at intervals. The camel has a wonderful arrangement of elastic ligament which takes a good deal of the strain away from the muscles at the normal paces.
It is rather a depressing thought that, although the camel is now understood so much better than he used to be, and his potential economic value is thereby enormously increased, the advantage has been cancelled out by the internal combustion engine almost as soon as the knowledge was acquired and spread. Whatever happens to camel-transport, there is some future for camel-breeders in the meat-trade, although few have recognised it yet. Camel meat from animals reared for food is excellent. A world scarcity of meat must favour the production of an animal which can fatten in country so arid that other