to gloat distantly over the little
brown lump of loose tangled fibres rapidly reducing to sponginess under
the downpour from the skies. The long mound of raw red earth, crusted with
greenish-yellow streaks of lyddite from the bursting-charges, rises now
immediately before him. At its eastern end is a flagstaff displaying the
Union Jack. Under the roof of the little penthouse from which the
flagstaff rises are sheltered the vari-coloured acetylene lamps that are
used for signalling at night.

Midway of the raw mound rises the rear elevation of an officer in dripping
waterproofs, who is looking steadily through a telescope out between the
long driving lances of the rain, beyond Maxim Kopje South to those
mysterious hills, swathed in grey-black folds of storm-cloud, that look so
desolate, and whose folds are yet as full of swarming, active, malignant
life as the blanket of an unwashed Kaffir. An N.C.O. is posted a little
below the officer, whose narrow shoulders and dark hair, showing above the
edge of the turned-up collar and below the brim of the Field-Service cap,
prove him to be not Beauvayse. And the usual blizzard of rifle-fire,
varied by brisk bursts of cannonading, goes on, and the Red Scythe of the
Destroyer sweeps over these two figures and about them in the customary
way. But even women and children have grown indifferent to these things,
and the men have long ceased to be aware of them.

A bullet sings past Saxham's ear, as the acrid exhalations of a stable
rise gratefully to his nostrils, recently saluted by the fierce and
clamorous smells of the native village. The ground slopes under his feet.
He goes down the inclined way that ends in the horses' quarters, and the
orderly, who is sitting on an empty ammunition-box outside the tarpaulin
that screens off the interior of the officer's shelter, stiffens to the
salute, receives a brief message, and disappears within.

Before Saxham rise the bony brown and bay and chestnut hindquarters of
half a dozen lean horses, that are drowsing or fidgeting before their
emptied mangers. Against the division of a loose-box that holds a fine
brown charger, still saddled and steaming, and heavily splashed with mud,
there leans a stretcher, which, by the ominous red stains and splashes
upon it, has been recently in use.

Upon Saxham's left hand is the shelter for the rank and file. Here several
gaunt, hollow-eyed, and hairy troopers are sitting on rough benches at a
trestle-t