“Sahib, it is a fine war, a hell of a fine war, but for the great guns.”

“And wherefore?”

“Because we cannot come nigh unto them.  But I, I have slain many men.”

“And what is your village?” asks my friend, Major D——­, of the I.M.S.

“Chorah.”

“Why, I was there in the Tirah campaign.”

“Even so, sahib.”

The Ghurkhas looked on in silence at our symposium, their broad Mongolian faces inscrutable.  But Shiva Lal, a Brahmin surgeon, who all this while has been eager to speak, for he is a pundit, and loves the sound of his own voice, here thrust forward his quaint countenance, whose walrus-like moustache conceals a row of teeth projecting like the spokes of a wicker-basket.  Softly he rubs his hands and thus he speaks in English:  “Sahib, I had charge of a German sahib—­wounded.  And I said unto him, ’How is it that you, who are Christians, treat the Tommies so?  We’ (Major D——­ looks at me with the hint of a twinkle in his eye—­for has he not told me at mess of that surprising change in the Indian vernacular whereby their speech is no longer of “Goora-log” and “Sahib-log” but of “We,” which fraternal pronoun is significant of much)—­’we shave you and feed you, we wash you and dress your wounds, even as one of ourselves, and you kill our wounded Tommies, yea, and do these things and worse even unto women.  Are you not Christians?  We’ (there is a return to old habits of speech)—­’we are only Indians, but I have read in your Bible that if one smite on the one cheek’”—­here Shiva Lal, who has now what he loves most in the world, an audience, and is easily histrionic, smites his face mightily on the right side—­“’one should turn to him the other.  Why is this?’”

“And what said the German officer, Shiva Lal?”

“Nay, sahib, he said nothing.”  We also say nothing.  For Shiva Lal needs but little encouragement to talk from sunset to cock-crow.  Perhaps the unfortunate German officer divined as much.  But the spell of Shiva Lal’s eloquence is rudely broken by Major D——­, who takes me by the arm to go elsewhere.  And the little group squatting on their haunches at their mid-day meal cease listening and dip their chupattis in the aromatic dhal, in that slow, ruminant, ritualistic way in which the Indian always eats his food.

“Ram, Ram!  Tumhi kothun alle?” said my friend Smith, turning aside to a lonely figure on my right.  A cry of joy escapes a dark-featured Mahratta who has been looking mournfully on from his bed of pain, comprehending nothing of these dialogues.  We have, indeed, been talking in every language except Mahrathi.  And he, poor soul, has lost both feet—­they were frostbitten—­and will never answer the music of the charge again.  But at the sound of his own tongue he raises his body by the pulley hanging at the head of his cot, and gravely salutes the sahib.  Like Ruth amid the alien corn, his heart is sad with thoughts of home, and he has been dreaming between these iron walls of the wide, sunlit spaces of the Deccan.  As his feverish brain counts and re-counts the rivets on the ship-plates, ever and anon they part before his wistful eyes, and he sees again the little village with its grove of mangoes and its sacred banyan on the inviolable otla; he hears once again the animated chatter of the wayfarers in the chowdi.