Away in front of us we note the snow-crowned hills which girdle Basutoland, snow crowned and sun kissed; every hilltop sparkling like a giant gem, and over all a pale blue sky, curtained by flimsy clouds of gauzy whiteness, through which the sun laughs rosily, the handiwork of the Eternal.  And underfoot only the deep dead blackness of the blistered veldt, ravished of its wondrous wealth of living green, the rude, rough footprint of the god of war—­sweet war; kind, Christian war!

Now, overhead, betwixt the smoking earth and smiling sky, flocks of vultures come and go, fluttering their great pinions noiselessly.  To them the sound of guns is 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.