siege for food and tobacco. He seemed to offer
it as being in some way an official apology for his starved appearance.
The price of cigars struck me as especially pathetic, and I commented on
it. The first officer gazed mournfully at the blazing sunshine before
him. "I have not smoked a cigar in two months," he said. My surging
sympathy, and my terror at again offending the haughty garrison, combated
so fiercely that it was only with a great effort that I produced a
handful. "Will you have these?" The other officer started in his saddle
so violently that I thought his horse had stumbled, but he also kept his
eyes straight in front. "Thank you, I will take one if I may--just one,"
said the first officer. "Are you sure I am not robbing you?" They each
took one, but they refused to put the rest of the cigars in their
pockets. As the printed list stated that a dozen matches sold for $1.75,
I handed them a box of matches. Then a beautiful thing happened. They
lit the cigars and at the first taste of the smoke--and they were not
good cigars--an almost human expression of peace and good-will and utter
abandonment to joy spread over their yellow skins and cracked lips and
fever-lit eyes. The first man dropped his reins and put his hands on his
hips and threw back his head and shoulders and closed his eyelids. I
felt that I had intruded at a moment which should have been left sacred.
{5}

Another boy officer in stainless khaki and beautifully turned out,
polished and burnished and varnished, but with the same yellow skin and
sharpened cheek-bones and protruding teeth, a skeleton on horseback, rode
slowly toward us down the hill. As he reached us he glanced up and then
swayed in his saddle, gazing at my companions fearfully. "Good God," he
cried. His brother officers seemed to understand, but made no answer,
except to jerk their heads toward me. They were too occupied to speak.
I handed the skeleton a cigar, and he took it in great embarrassment,
laughing and stammering and blushing. Then I began to understand; I
began to appreciate the heroic self-sacrifice of the first two, who, when
they had been given the chance, had refused to fill their pockets. I
knew then that it was an effort worthy of the V. C.

The censor was at his post, and a few minutes later a signal officer on
Convent Hill heliographed my cable to Bulwana, where, six hours after the
Boers had abandoned it, Buller's own helios had begun to dance