ry, demolishing the good dishes furnished by
the _chef_ of Nixey's Hotel, with the hungry zest of schoolboys,
exchanging fusillades of not very brilliant chaff.

Scraps of scientific and technical conversation with reference to
telephonic and telegraphic installations between outlying forts and
headquarters, electric communication with mines, automatic
warning-apparatus, the most effective methods of constructing bomb-proof
shelters, the comparative merits of Maxim and Nordenfeldt, crossed in the
air like fragments of bursting projectiles, impelled by those admirable
engines of destruction. Mingled with reminiscences of cricket, golf,
tennis, polo, and motoring, then in its infancy; anecdotes new and old,
and conjectures as to what the fellows at home were doing? Hurlingham and
Ranelagh, Maidenhead and Henley, Eton and Oxford, Sandhurst and Aldershot,
Piccadilly in the season, Simla in the heats, the results for Kempton Park
and Newmarket Races--of all these they talked, with rhino and elephant
shooting and the big battues of pheasants now taking place in the Home
Midlands and up North. But though the watch-fires of their pickets burned
upon the veld, and though the Boer lay in laager over the Border, of him
they said not one word. That reticence upon the vital point was
characteristically English. The excitable Gaul would have wept, kneaded
his manly bosom, and alluded to his mother; the stolid Muscovite would
have wept also, referring to his Little Father, the Czar; the Teuton would
have poured forth oceans of turgid sentiment about the Fatherland; the
dignified Spaniard would have recognised himself as a warrior upon the
verge of a Homeric struggle, and said so candidly; the hysterical American
would have sung "Hail, Columbia!" and waved pocket-handkerchief-sized
replicas of the Star-Spangled Banner until too exhausted to agitate or
vocalise. But to these men indulgence in sentiment was "bad form," and
unrestrained patriotic utterance merely "gas," tainting the air with an
odour as of election-eggs or sulphuretted hydrogen. Therefore were many
words to be avoided.

A pose, if you will, an affectation, this studied avoidance of all
appearance of enthusiasm or excitement; showing the weak spot in the
armour of these heroes, henceforth to be of epic fame. But Man is
essentially a weak being. It is only when the immortal spirit of him
nerves the frame of perishable bone and muscle that he rises to heights
that are subli