same result to
the battle; but he also saw the way out of it, and he gave orders
accordingly. When the horses were lashed to a gallop to take up the new
position, which, if they reached, would give them shelter against this
fiendish rain of lead, and also enable them to enfilade the foe at
advantage, something suddenly brought confusion to his senses, and the
clear thinking stopped. His being seemed to expand suddenly to an
enormity of chaos and then as suddenly to shrink, dwindle, and fall
back into a smother--as though, in falling, blankets were drawn roughly
over his head and a thousand others were shaken in the air around him.
And both were real in their own way. The thousand blankets flapping in
the air were the machine guns of the foe following his battery into a
zone of less dreadful fire, and the blankets that smothered him were
wrappings of unconsciousness which save us from the direst agonies of
body and mind.

The last thing he saw, as his eyes, with a final effort of power,
sought to escape from this sudden confusion, was a herd of springboks
flinging themselves about in the circle of fire, caught in the struggle
of the two armies, and, like wild birds in a hurricane, plunging here
and there in flight and futile motion. As unconsciousness enwrapped him
the vision of these distraught denizens of the veld was before his
eyes. Somehow, in a lightning transformation, he became one with them
and was mingled with them.

Time passed.

When his eyes opened again, slowly, heavily, the same vision was before
him--the negative left on the film of his sight by his last conscious
glance at the world.

He raised himself on his elbow and looked out over the veld. The
springboks were still distractedly tossing here and there, but the army
to which he belonged had moved on. It was now on its way up the hill
lying between them and the Besieged City. He was dimly conscious of
this, for the fight round him had ceased, the storm had gone forward.
There was noise, great noise, but he was outside of it, in a kind of
valley of awful inactivity. All round him was the debris of a world in
which he had once lived and moved and worked. How many years--or
centuries--was it since he had been in that harvest of death? There was
no anomaly. It was not that time had passed; it was that his soul had
made so far a journey.

In his sleep among the guns and the piteous, mutilated dead, he had
gone a pilgrimage to a Distant Place and had