“They had left the incessant
passenger-traffic of the north and west far and far behind them.
Here the people crawled to the side of the train, holding their
little ones in their arms; and a loaded truck would be left
behind, the men and women clustering round it like ants by
spilled honey. Once in the twilight they saw on a dusty plain a
regiment of little brown men, each bearing a body over his
shoulder; and when the train stopped to leave yet another truck,
they perceived that the burdens were not corpses, but only
foodless folk picked up beside dead oxen by a corps of Irregular
troops. Now they met more white men, here one and there two,
whose tents stood close to the line, and who came armed with
written authorities and angry words to cut off a truck. They were
too busy to do more than nod at Scott and Martyn, and stare
curiously at William, who could do nothing except make tea, and
watch how her men staved off the rush of wailing, walking
skeletons, putting them down three at a time in heaps, with their
own hands uncoupling the marked trucks, or taking receipts from
the hollow-eyed, weary white men, who spoke another argot
than theirs. They ran out of ice, out of soda-water, and out of
tea; for they were six days and seven nights on the road, and it
seemed to them like seven times seven years.
At last, in a dry, hot dawn, in a land of death, lit by long red
fires of railway-sleepers, where they were burning the dead,
they came to their destination, and were met by Jim Hawkins, the
Head of the Famine, unshaven, unwashed, but cheery, and entirely
in command of affairs.
Martyn, he decreed then and there, was to live on trains till
further orders; was to go back with empty trucks, filling them
with starving people as he found them, and dropping them at a
famine-camp on the edge of the Eight Districts. He would pick
up supplies and return, and his constables would guard the loaded
grain-cars, also picking up people, and would drop them at a
camp a hundred miles south. Scott Hawkins was very glad to see
Scott again - would that same hour take charge of a convoy of
bullock-carts, and would go south, feeding as he went, to yet
another famine-camp, where he would leave his starving -there
would he no lack of starving on the route - and wait for orders
by telegraph.Generally, Scott was in all small things to act as
he thought best.”
From “The Day’s Work” (1898)