eepsakes.
Up at the front, brown and yellow regiments are lying crouched behind
brown and yellow rocks and stones. As far as you can see, the hills are
sown with them. With a glass you distinguish them against the sky-line
of every hill, for over three miles away. Sometimes the men rise and
fire, and there is a feverish flutter of musketry; sometimes they lie
motionless for hours while the guns make the ways straight.

Any one who has seen Epsom Downs on a Derby day, with its thousands of
vans and tents and lines of horses and moving mobs, can form some idea of
what it is like. But while at the Derby all is interest and excitement,
and every one is pushing and struggling, and the air palpitates with the
intoxication of a great event, the winning of a horse-race--here, where
men are killed every hour and no one of them knows when his turn may
come, the fact that most impresses you is their indifference to it all.
What strikes you most is the bored air of the Tommies, the undivided
interest of the engineers in the construction of a pontoon bridge, the
solicitude of the medical staff over the long lines of wounded, the rage
of the naked Kaffirs at their lumbering steers; the fact that every one
is intent on something--anything--but the battle.

They are wearied with battles. The Tommies stretch themselves in the sun
to dry the wet khaki in which they have lain out in the cold night for
weeks, and yawn at battles. Or, if you climb to the hill where the
officers are seated, you will find men steeped even deeper in boredom.
They are burned a dark red; their brown mustaches look white by contrast,
theirs are the same faces you have met with in Piccadilly, which you see
across the tables of the Savoy restaurant, which gaze depressedly from
the windows of White's and the Bachelors' Club. If they were bored then,
they are unbearably bored now. Below them the men of their regiment lie
crouched amid the bowlders, hardly distinguishable from the brown and
yellow rock. They are sleeping, or dozing, or yawning. A shell passes
over them like the shaking of many telegraph wires, and neither officer
nor Tommy raises his head to watch it strike. They are tired in body and
in mind, with cramped limbs and aching eyes. They have had twelve nights
and twelve days of battle, and it has lost its power to amuse.

When the sergeants call the companies together, they are eager enough.
Anything is better than lying still looking up at