plaintively protesting their neutrality with such a garish display of coloured lights as to suggest a midnight regatta of all the neutral nations.  A troop train was speeding north and a hospital train crawling south, their coming and going betrayed only to the ear, for they showed no lights.  The one was freighted with youth, health, life; the other with pain, wounds, death.  It was the systole and diastole of the Base.

V

A COUNCIL OF INDIA

“And I said, ’Nay, I who have eaten the King’s salt cannot do this thing.’  And the German-log said to me, ’But we will give you both money and land.’  And I said, ’Wherefore should I do this thing, and bring sorrow and shame upon my people?’”

It was a Sepoy in the 9th who spake, and his words were exceeding clear as Holy Writ.

“And what did they do then?”

“They took my chupattis, sahib, and offered me of their bread in return.  But I said, ‘Nay, I am a Brahmin, and cannot touch it.’  And they said thrice unto me, ‘We will give you money and land.’  And I thrice said, ‘Nay.’  Then said they, ’Thou art a fool.  Go to, but if thou comest against us again we will kill thee.’  And I got back to my comrades.”

“Yea, to me also they said these things.”  It was a jemindar of the 129th who spoke.  “Yes, a German sahib called to me in Hindustani, ’Ham dost hein—­Hamari pas ao—­Ham tum Ko Nahn Marenge.’” Which being translated is, “We are friends, come to us, we won’t kill you.”

“And you, Mula Sing, what think you of this war?”

The Woordie-Major replied:  “Sahib, never was there a war like this war, since the world began.  No, not even the Mahabharata when Kouro fought Pandu.”

Then spoke up a subadar of the Pioneers, a tall Sikh with his beard curled like the ancient Assyrians.  He had shown me the five symbols of the Sikh freemasonry—­nay, he had taken the kangha out of his hair and shown me the two little knives, also the hair-ring and the bracelet, and had unwound the spirals of his unshaven locks.  Therefore we were friends.  “All wars are but shikkar to this war, sahib.”  “Shikkar?” “Yea, even as a tiger-hunt.  But this, this is an exceeding great war.”

“Nay, this is a fine war—­a hell of a fine war.”  The speaker was an Afridi from Tirah, whose strongly marked aquiline features reminded me of nothing so much as a Jewish pawnbroker in Whitechapel.  He lacks every virtue except courage, and his one regret is that he has missed the family blood-feud.  There have been great doings in his family on the frontier in his absence—­two abductions and one homicide.  “If I had not come home,” his brother has written reproachfully to him from Tirah, “things had gone ill with us.  But never mind about all this now.  Do your duty well.”  And even so has he done.

“And how like you this war?”