ut
from Istabulat with the card, 'G.S.[11] wound, right arm.' So much for
presentiment in some cases. A different case occurred next day.

I found my mess sitting down to dinner. 'Montag' Warren, our P.M.C.,
had excellently acquired dates and white mulberries, which last made a
stew, poorly tasting, but a change from long monotony. A clamour
greeted me. 'Where've you been, padre? What's the news?' I told them we
had got on well. Then some one asked, 'But what did you hear about our
casualties?' Minds were tense, for every one knew that next day our
brigade must take up the attack, and for a whole day we had seen Hell
in full eruption on our right. I told them other things I had
learnt--told them anything that might brush aside the awkward question.
But they demanded to know. Neither do I see how I could have avoided
telling. So at last I said, 'Well, what I was told was sixteen
hundred.'

Silence fell. To some, sixteen hundred may seem a butcher's bill so
trifling that brave men--and these were men superlatively brave,
officers of the 17th Foot, and some of them had seen more pitched
battles than years, had known Ypres and Loos and Neuve Chapelle,
Gallipoli and Sheikh Saad--would not concede it a momentary blanching
of the cheek. But these sixteen hundred casualties were out of barely
four thousand men engaged, including gunners. In that minute each man
communed with his own spirit,

Voyaging through strange fields of thought alone.

The reader will be weary of _Henry V._ Nevertheless Shakespeare came to
the aid of us, his countrymen, again as gallant old Fowke quoted from
the heart and brain of England:

He which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart....
We would not die in that man's company,
That fears his fellowship to die with us.

So laughter ended a terrible day. Next day our tiny band was the
spearhead of a handful of fifteen hundred bayonets, who caught the Turk
in his fastnesses, wrested guns and prisoners from him, and slew and
broke his forces so that they recoiled for thirty miles.

There was no rest. Through the darkness J.Y. flitted to and fro, and
here and there a spectral blaze flickered furtively. We had neither
blankets nor greatcoats, for fear of shell-fire made it impossible to
bring the carts up. The night was infernal with cold; sand-flies rose
in myriads from the ground; we shivered and itched in our shorts. Old
aches and pains found me out, rheumatism and tr