“The speakers had been ranting along, urging on the people to force the government to give in and make terms with those devils who’d crushed Belgium.  Of course there were plenty there ready to die in the last ditch for honor and the country, but the mob was with the speakers.  Quite insane with terror the mob was.  And I spoke aloud to Kitchener, like a madman of a sort also, begging him to come from another world and save his people.

“‘This is the hour; come and save us,’ said I, and said it as if my words could get through to Kitchener in eternity.

“With that a taxicab forced through the crowd, close to the platform, and it stopped and somebody got out.  I could see an officer’s cap and the crowd pressing.  My eyes were riveted on that brown cap; my breath came queerly; there was a murmur, a hush and a murmur together, where that tall officer with the cap over his face pushed toward the speakers.  I felt I should choke if I didn’t see him—­and I couldn’t see him.  Then he made the platform, and before my eyes, before the eyes of twenty thousand people, he stood there—­Kitchener!”

General Cochrane stared defiantly 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.