at me. "I'm not asking you to believe
this," he said. "I'm merely telling you--what happened."

"Go on," I whispered.

He went on: "A silence like death fell on that vast crowd. The voice of
the speaker screaming out wild cowardice about mercy from the Germans
kept on for a few words, and then the man caught the electrical
atmosphere and was aware that something was happening. He halted
half-way in a word, and turned and faced the grim, motionless
figure--Kitchener. The man stared a half minute and shot his hands up
and howled, and ran into the throng. All over the great place, by then,
was a whisper swelling into a bass murmur, into a roar, his name.

"'Kitchener--Kitchener!' and 'K. of K.!' and 'Kitchener of Khartoum!'

"Never in my life have I heard a volume of sound like London shouting
that day the name of Kitchener. After a time he lifted his hand and
stood, deep-eyed and haggard, as the mass quieted. He spoke. I can't
tell you what he said. I couldn't have told you the next hour. But he
quieted us and lifted us, that crowd, fearstruck, sobbing, into courage.
He put his own steady dignity into those cheap, frightened little
Johnnies. He gave us strength even if the worst came, and he held up
English pluck and doggedness for us to look at and to live by. As his
voice stopped, as I stood down in front just under him, I flung up my
arms, and I suppose I cried out something; I was but a lad of twenty,
and half crazed with the joy of seeing him. And he swung forward a step
to me as if he had seen me all the time--and I think he had. 'Do the
turn, Donald,' he said, 'The time has come for a Cochrane to save
England.'

"And with that he wheeled and without a look to right or left, in his
own swift, silent, shy way he was gone.

"Nobody saw where he went. I all but killed myself for an hour trying to
find him, but it was of no use. And with that, as I sat at my lunch, too
feverish and stirred to eat food, demanding over and over what he meant,
what the 'turn' was which I was to do, why a Cochrane should have a
chance to save England--with that, suddenly I knew."

General Cochrane halted again, and again he gazed down the little river,
the river of England, the river which he, more than any other, had kept
for English folk and their peaceful play-times. I knew I must not hurry
him; I waited.

"The thing came to me like lightning," he went on, "and I had only to go
from one simple step to another; it seemed all tho