rush, everyone going as hard as
possible, and trusting to Providence to pull them through.

Most of the officers at the tables soon became highly elated. That is
the way when your stomach has been fed on hard rations and you have
had fourteen days of the sun. They then all began shouting and singing
and not talking so much. But still they were all devilishly keen to
know about the siege, and who had fought best, and who had been
killed.

I left them in what remains of a little barricaded and fortified hotel
disputing away in rather a foolish fashion, because they were more or
less inebriate and the sun had burned them badly. And speeding to my
_cache_, I drew out my two blankets and my waterproof. While I had
been forgetting other things, I had learned two new things--how to
sleep and how to shoot--and now since there was no more need to
practise the one, I would do the other.

PART III-THE SACK

I

THE PALACE

16th August, 1900.

* * * * *

The next morning (which was only yesterday!) I awoke in much the same
strange despondency. Around me, as the grey light stole softly into my
lean-to, everything was absolutely quiet. It was the same in every way
as it had been the morning after the last terrible night; and yet that
was already so long ago! Almost mechanically, I searched the breast
pocket of my soil-worn shirt for the previous day's orders, so as to
see about picquet posting; then I remembered suddenly, with a curious
heart-sinking, that it was all over, finished, completed.... It was
so strange that it should be so--that everything should have come so
suddenly to an end. After all those experiences, to be lying on the
ground like some tramp in Europe, without a thing to one's name, was
to be merely grotesque and incongruous. Yet it was necessary to become
accustomed immediately to the idea that one belonged to the ordinary
world, where one would not be distinguished from one's fellow; where
everything was quiet and orderly.... And I was separated from this by
such a mighty gulf. I knew so many things now. What! was I no longer
to experience that supreme delight of shooting and being shot at--of
that unending excitement? Oh! was it really over?...

I got up, and shook myself disconsolately, retied what remained of a
neckcloth, and then looked in disgust at my boots. My boots! Two and a
half months' work and sleep in them--my only pair--had not improved
their appea