Out at the barracks of the West African Frontier Force, the
W.A.F.F.'s, the officers, instead of from the shade of the veranda
watching the non-coms. teach a native the manual, were themselves at
work, and each was howling orders at the black recruits and smashing
a gun against his hip and shoulder as smartly as a drill sergeant. I
found the standard maintained at Calabar the more interesting
because the men were almost entirely their own audience. If they
make the place healthy, and attractive-looking, and dress for
dinner, and shy at cocktails, and insist that their tan shoes shall
glow like meershaum pipes, it is not because of the refining
presence of lovely women, but because the men themselves like things
that way. The men of Calabar have learned that when the sun is at
110, morals, like material things, disintegrate, and that, though
the temptation is to go about in bath-room slippers and pajamas, one
is wiser to bolster up his drenched and drooping spirit with a stiff
shirt front and a mess jacket. They tell that in a bush station in
upper Nigeria, one officer got his D.S.O. because with an audience
of only a white sergeant he persisted in a habit of shaving twice a
day.
[Illustration: The Home of the Thirty Queens of King Mango Bell.]
There are very few women in Calabar. There are three or four who are
wives of officials, two nurses employed by the government, and the
Mother Superior and Sisters of the Order of St.
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