s merriest music; it is their summons to the banquet
board. Foul things they look as the float over us, silent as souls that
have slipped from some ash heap in Hades, grey with the greyness that grows
on the wolf's hide; their feathers hang upon them in ridges, unkempt,
unlovely, soiled with blood and offal. They float above our heads, they
wheel upon our flanks.

A horse drops wearily upon its knees, looks round dumbly on the wilderness
of blackness, then turns its piteous eyes upward towards the skies that
seem so full of laughing loveliness; then, with a sob which is almost human
in the intensity of its pathos, the tired head falls downwards, the limbs
contract with spasmodic pain, then stiffen into rigidity; and one wonders,
if the Eternal mocked that silent appeal from those great sad eyes, eyes
that had neither part nor lot in the sin and sorrow of war, how shall a man
dare look upwards for help when the bitterness of death draws nigh unto
him? The grey lines above, on flank, and front, and rear, were with greedy
speed converging to one point, until they flock in a horrid, struggling,
fighting, revolting mass of beaks and feathers above the fallen steed, as
devils flock around the deathbed of a defaulting deacon. A soldier on the
outer edge of the extended line swings his rifle with swift, backhanded
motion over his shoulder, and brings the butt amidst the crowd of carrion.
The vultures hop with grotesque, ungainly motions from their prey, and
stand with wings extended and clawed feet apart, their necks outstretched
and curved heads dripping slime and blood, a fitting setting amidst the
black ruin of war. The charger now looks upward from eyeless sockets; his
gutted carcass, flattened into a shapeless streak, shrinks towards the
earth, as if asking to be veiled from the laughter of the skies. But there
is neither pity from above nor shelter from below as the red wave of war,
like the curse of the white Christ, sweeps over the land. God grant that
merry England may never witness, on her own green meadow lands, these
sights and sounds which meet the eye and ear on African soil.

Oh, England, England, if I had a voice whose clarion tones could reach your
ears and stir your hearts in every city and town, village and hamlet,
wayside cot and stately castle, in all your sea-encircled isle, I would cry
to you to guard your coasts! Better, it seems to me, writing here, with all
the evidences of war beneath my eyes, that eve