ounted and unmounted, who
moved, or halted, or stood like an animal with a thousand legs
controlled by one mind. Or again you would have observed those myriad
masses plunging across the veld, still in cohering masses, which shook
and broke and scattered, regathering again, as though drawn by a
magnet, but leaving stark remnants in their wake.

Great columns of troops which had crossed the river and pushed on into
a zone of fierce fire, turn and struggle back again across the stream;
other thousands of men, who had not crossed, succour their wounded, and
retreat steadily, bitterly to places of safety, the victims of blunders
from which come the bloody punishment of valour.

Beyond the grey mountains were British men and women waiting for
succour from forces which poured death in upon them from the malevolent
kopjes, for relief from the ravages of disease and hunger. They waited
in a straggling town of the open plain circled by threatening hills,
where the threat became a blow, and the blow was multiplied a million
times. Gaunt, fighting men sought to appease the craving of starvation
by the boiled carcasses of old horses; in caves and dug-outs, feeble
women, with undying courage, kept alive the flickering fires of life in
their children; and they smiled to cheer the tireless, emaciated
warriors who went out to meet death, or with a superior yet careful
courage stayed to receive or escape it.

When night came, across the hills and far away in the deep blue, white
shaking streams of light poured upward, telling the besieged forces
over there at Lordkop that rescue would come, that it was moving on to
the mountain. How many times had this light in the sky flashed the same
grave pledge in the mystic code of the heliograph, "We are gaining
ground--we will reach you soon." How many times, however, had the
message also been, "Not yet--but soon."

Men died in this great camp from wounds and from fever, and others went
mad almost from sheer despair; yet whenever the Master Player called,
they sprang to their places with a new-born belief that he who had been
so successful in so many long-past battles would be right in the end
with his old rightness, though he had been wrong so often on the
Dreitval.

Others there were who were sick of the world and wished "to be well out
of it"--as they said to themselves. Some had been cruelly injured, and
desire of life was dead in them; others had given injury, and remorse
had slain peac