ads of their own artillery, bursting impotently in white smoke or
tearing up the veldt in fountains of dust.

But they did not heed them. They did not even send a revengeful bullet
into the approaching masses. The sweetness of revenge could not pay for
what they had lost. They looked down upon the farm-houses of men they
knew; upon their own farm-houses rising in smoke; they saw the Englishmen
like a pest of locusts settling down around gardens and farm-houses still
nearer, and swallowing them up.

Their companions, already far on the way to safety, waved to them from
the veldt to follow; an excited doctor carrying a wounded man warned us
that the English were just below, storming the hill. "Our artillery is
aiming at five hundred yards," he shouted, but still the remaining
burghers stood immovable, leaning on their rifles, silent, homeless,
looking down without rage or show of feeling at the great waves of khaki
sweeping steadily toward them, and possessing their land.

THE JAPANESE-RUSSIAN WAR: BATTLES I DID NOT SEE

We knew it was a battle because the Japanese officers told us it was. In
other wars I had seen other battles, many sorts of battles, but I had
never seen a battle like that one. Most battles are noisy, hurried, and
violent, giving rise to an unnatural thirst and to the delusion that, by
some unhappy coincidence, every man on the other side is shooting only at
you. This delusion is not peculiar to myself. Many men have told me
that in the confusion of battle they always get this exaggerated idea of
their own importance. Down in Cuba I heard a colonel inform a group of
brother officers that a Spanish field-piece had marked him for its own,
and for an hour had been pumping shrapnel at him and at no one else. The
interesting part of the story was that he believed it.

But the battle of Anshantien was in no way disquieting. It was a
noiseless, odorless, rubber-tired battle. So far as we were concerned it
consisted of rings of shrapnel smoke floating over a mountain pass many
miles distant. So many miles distant that when, with a glass, you could
see a speck of fire twinkle in the sun like a heliograph, you could not
tell whether it was the flash from the gun or the flame from the shell.
Neither could you tell whether the cigarette rings issued from the lips
of the Japanese guns or from those of the Russians. The only thing about
that battle of which you were certain was that it was a p