as for the ambulance, they have had plenty of work, and
might easily miss him, if he is senseless, and unable to call out."

He went round to the Field Hospital, where the surgeons were busy at
work, and applied for a stretcher. But he was told it was unnecessary
to take one, there were several about the fatal spot where the hard
fighting had taken place, and two others which had just brought in their
blood-stained burdens were going back presently.

So the three went on their way unencumbered.

It was perfectly calm and still; the sun was getting low in the west,
but its rays, though not so scorching as at mid-day, were sickening, and
productive of extreme lassitude. On the first low range of hills they
crossed the bodies were not numerous, and down in the valley at the foot
of them they only came upon one group. A knot of Arabs retreating to
their last position had evidently been overtaken by a shell bursting in
their midst, and their fearfully mangled bodies showed what modern
science can effect when applied in earnest to the work of war. On the
next ridge the Soudanese dead lay thicker; lying dotted about singly
where the Martini-Henry bullets had stopped them, or strewed in rows
like the corn sheaves where the reaping machine has passed, as the
Gatling guns, sweeping slowly from right to left, and pouring missiles
with the regularity and continuous stream of a fire-engine, had mowed
their ranks.

"I say, Gubbins," said Davis, "we fought fairly well to-day I reckon;
but do you think we should have stood against such a fire as that?"

"Well, I don't know," replied Gubbins. "If there had been any cover
near I, for one, should have felt uncommon inclined to make for it. I
can't abide them shells and machine-guns."

"No, it seems like fighting against lightning and thunderbolts, don't
it?" said Davis.

But as this was an idea which required some cogitation and digesting
before it could become assimilated in the Gubbins' mind, it remained
without reply.

As they approached the edge of the nullah the harvest of Soudanese lay
thicker and thicker, and when they got down into the dry bed of the
watercourse, they had to pick their way in places to avoid treading on
the corpses.

And here, for the first time, English dead lay intermingled with the
Arab. There was peace between them now.

"Look carefully here," said Green, turning over a kharkee-clad body
which lay on its face as he spoke: it was not his frie