bows, with chest, with stomach, with legs,
he was trying to press hard against the ground. It is a curious
feeling, that lying down and trying to press against the ground. He
wished to reduce himself to the substance of a postage-stamp. This was
the day of his first fight, but since he had got up everything was
unaccountably unlike his expectation. The reveille had sounded in the
dark at three o'clock in the morning. It was bitterly cold outside the
tents, and his hands trembled as he fumbled with his putties. He had
had a hard struggle to turn out from under that warm rug where he had
been dreaming the real soldier's dream. Detaille's picture is all
rot--the soldier's dream is not the picture of victorious battalions
with banners flying, marching through the clouds. He had been dreaming
of tripe and onions. Visions of past good meals in comfortable
quarters washed down with deep cooling draughts of bitter floated in
procession through sizzling clouds of vapour smelling of invisible
kitchens. As he fumbled with his putties the rumble of waggons came
out of darkness from a road hard by, mingled with the sharper rattle
that tells of the gunners already on the move. The vague rumours of
last night, he felt, were going to shape into the actuality of fight;
but what an hour to go out fighting! Why should they be hauled out to
fight in the dark? Why could not men wait for light? Wait until the
world was aired? He was thirsty and uncomfortable, with the taste of
stale tobacco in his mouth, and joined in the variegated imprecations
muttered by the men when he found there would be only a few minutes to
get anything to eat and no time for hot coffee. Presently he is a unit
in a long snake-like column of men that winds along the road through
the dark into the unknown. As he plods on he speculates how the fight
will start. Perhaps the kopjes on either side of the road may be
already full of Boers. Perhaps the beginning of the fight will be to
find that they have marched into another ambush. It was a nasty
uncomfortable feeling, that tramping through the darkness into the
unknown. He felt better as the light spread from the eastern hills,
and felt companionship and security in being part and parcel of that
great mass of men that extended before and behind him on the road as
far as he could see. Suddenly there is the boom of a gun, and he comes
into collision with the man in front of him, who has stopped dead at
the sound. A strange t