matches!” “And ’ere; I’ve got a bit of candle.”  “Where?” “Oh, do straighten out my arm!” “’Ere, ’old out your ’and.”  “Got it,” and the light flickered up again round the broken figure, and the arm was laid straight.  As the touch came on to the clammy fingers it met something wet and red, and the prone body quivered all over.  “What,” said the weak voice—­the smile struggled to come out again, but dropped back even sooner than before—­“have they got my finger too?” Then they covered up the body with a blanket, wringing wet, and left it to soak and shiver.  And that was one out of more than two hundred.

For hours—­and by now it was a month of nights—­every man with hands and legs toiled up and down, up and down, that ladder of pain.  By Heaven’s grace the Boers had filled their waggons with the loot of many stores; there were blankets to carry men in and mattresses whereon to lay them.  They came down with sprawling bearers, with jolts and groans, with “Oh, put me down; I can’t stand it!  I’m done anyhow; let me die quiet.”  And always would come back the cheery voice from doctor or officer or pal,—­“Done, colour-sergeant!  Nonsense, man!  Why, you’ll be back to duty in a fortnight.”  And the answer was another choked groan.

Hour by hour—­would day never break?  Not yet; it was just twenty minutes to ten—­man by man they brought them down.  The tent was carpeted now with limp bodies.  With breaking backs they heaved some shoulder-high into waggons; others they laid on mattresses on the ground.  In the rain-blurred light of the lantern—­could it not cease, that piercing drizzle to-night of all nights at least?  The doctor, the one doctor, toiled buoyantly on.  Cutting up their clothes with scissors, feeling with light firm fingers over torn chest or thigh, cunningly slipping round the bandage, tenderly covering up the crimson ruin of strong men—­hour by hour, man by man, he toiled on.

And mark—­and remember for the rest of your lives—­that Tommy Atkins made no distinction between the wounded enemy and his dearest friend.  To the men who in the afternoon were lying down behind rocks with rifles pointed to kill him, who had shot, may be, the comrade of his heart, he gave the last drop of his water, the last drop of his melting strength, the last drop of comfort he could wring out of his seared, gallant soul.  In war, they say,—­and it is true,—­men grow callous:  an afternoon of shooting and the loss of your brother hurts you less than a week before did a thorn in your dog’s foot.  But it is only compassion for the dead that dries up; and as it dries, the spring wells up among good men of sympathy with all the living.  A few men had made a fire in the gnawing damp and cold, and round it they sat, even the unwounded Boer prisoners.  For themselves they took the outer ring, and not a word did any man say that could mortify the wound of defeat.  In the afternoon Tommy was a hero, in the evening he was a gentleman.