war a change of some sort had come. Those who
emerged from it to return to England or her far Dominions, or to stay
in the land of the veld, of the kranz and the kloof and the spruit,
were never the same again. Something came which, to a degree,
transformed them, as the salts of the water and the air permeate the
skin and give the blood new life. None escaped the salt of the air of
conflict.

The smooth-faced young subaltern who but now had all his life before
him, realized the change when he was swept by the leaden spray of death
on Spion Kop, and received in his face of summer warmth, or in his
young exultant heart, the quietus to all his hopes, impulses and
desires. The young find no solace or recompense in the philosophy of
those who regard life as a thing greatly over-estimated.

Many a private grown hard of flesh and tense of muscle, with his scant
rations and meagre covering in the cold nights, with his long marches
and fruitless risks and futile fightings, when he is shot down, has
little consolation, save in the fact that the thing he and his comrades
and the regiment and the army set out to do is done. If he has to do
so, he gives his life with a stony sense of loss which has none of the
composure of those who have solace in thinking that what they leave
behind has a constantly decreasing value. And here and there some
simple soul, more gifted than his comrades, may touch off the meaning
of it all, as it appears to those who hold their lives in their hands
for a nation's sake, by a stroke of mordant comment.

So it was with that chess-playing private from New Zealand of whom
Barry Whalen told Ian Stafford. He told it a few days after Rudyard
Byng had won that fight at Hetmeyer's Kopje, which had enabled the
Master Player to turn the flank of the Boers, though there was yet grim
frontal work to do against machines of Death, carefully hidden and
masked on the long hillsides, which would take staggering toll of
Britain's manhood.

"From behind Otago there in New Zealand, he came," began Barry, "as
fine a fella of thirty-three as ever you saw. Just come, because he
heard old Britain callin'. Down he drops the stock-whip, away he shoves
the plough, up he takes his little balance from the bank, sticks his
chess-box in his pocket, says 'so-long' to his girl, and treks across
the world, just to do his whack for the land that gave him and all his
that went before him the key to civilization, and how to be happy
t