Heart Searchings
The Zulu “rebellion” was full of new experiences and gave me much food for thought. The Boer War had not brought home to me the horrors of war with anything like the vividness that the “rebellion” did. This was no war but a manhunt, not only in my opinion, but also in that of many Englishmen with whom I had occasion to talk. To hear every morning reports of the soldiers’ rifles exploding like crackers in innocent hamlets, and to live in the midst of them was a trial. But I swallowed the bitter draught, especially as the work of my Corps consisted only in nursing the wounded Zulus. I could see that but for us the Zulus would have been uncared for. This work, therefore, eased my conscience.
But there was much else to set one thinking. It was a sparsely populated part of the country. Few and far between in hills and dales were the scattered kraals of the simple and so-called “uncivilized” Zulus. Marching, with or without the wounded, through these solemn solitudes, I often fell into deep thought.
I pondered over brahmacharya and its implications, and my convictions took deep root. I discussed it with my coworkers. I had not realized then how indispensable it was for self-realization, but I clearly saw that one aspiring to serve humanity with his whole soul could not do without it. It was borne in upon me that I should have more and more occasions for service of the kind I was rendering, and that I should find myself unequal to my task if I were engaged in the pleasures of family life and in the propagation and rearing of children.
In a word, I could not live both after the flesh and the spirit. On the present occasion, for instance, I should not have been able to throw