war had finished with him and had swung on. He was
hardly worth even an enemy's glance.

Riding by with my eyes intent on the moving fight ahead, I should have
passed him but for my dragoman. To Asaf there was nothing unusual in
the pitiful figure by the roadside, propped against a stone, with the
head fallen on an outstretched arm and a still hand clutching an empty
water-flask. It was the clothes that called a second glance. Save the
cartridge belt around the waist there was nothing to mark the man as a
soldier. The kindly hand which had placed him there had drawn over his
face a soiled gray hat; his suit was a worn blue serge, dyed now with
dark stains, and his feet were encased in patent-leather shoes, cracked
and almost soleless. The plain ahead was filled with the clamor of
battle; a pack-train clattered by me, hurrying to the front, and but
for these and for Asaf, the ragged Turk at my side, pointing mutely to
the still dark heap, I might have thought myself at home, in my own
valley, come suddenly on a mountain tragedy. And now I dismounted,
and, raising the hat, looked into the thin brown face that I had first
seen years ago so wistfully watching the little flake of cloud which
hovered over the ridges.

CHAPTER XXV

I had thought this morning that at last I was to see a pitched battle,
for the Greek army was well intrenched in the hills north of Pharsala
and made some show of a stand there. At noon I stood on the crest of
the same hills watching the usual retreat. A few miles away, its gray
houses blotched against the mountains which guard southern Thessaly,
was the town, and in the valley, drawing in toward it, the Greeks, with
the enemy on their rear and flanks enclosing them in a narrowing
semicircle of fire. Before me stretched the road, a white band across
the undulating green of the plain. In that road, a mile away, I saw
the rear-guard as it retired swiftly but steadily, facing again and
again to deliver its volleys into the lines of the advancing foe. Once
before I had seen that same small company fighting bravely as they were
now, checking the advance of a whole division. I knew them for the
Foreign Legion. Little black patches were left in the road as they
fell back, and it made me sick at heart to think of these men throwing
away their lives in so futile a cause. That little black patch had
been perhaps a student filled with fervor for Pan-Hellenism, a college
boy out for an