And while we thus perfected the Country, we were also eliminating all sorts of tediums, disputable possibilities, and deadlocks from the game.  We decided that every man should be as brave and skilful as every other man, and that when two men of opposite sides came into contact they would inevitably kill each other.  This restored strategy to its predominance over chance.

We then began to humanise that wild and fearful fowl, the gun.  We decided that a gun could not be fired if there were not six—­afterwards we reduced the number to four—­men within six inches of it.  And we ruled that a gun could not both fire and move in the same general move:  it could either be fired or moved (or left alone).  If there were less than six men within six inches of a gun, then we tried letting it fire as many shots as there were men, and we permitted a single man to move a gun, and move with it as far as he could go by the rules—­a foot, that is, if he was an infantry-man, and two feet if he was a cavalry-man.  We abolished altogether that magical freedom of an unassisted gun to move two feet.  And on such rules as these we fought a number of battles.  They were interesting, but not entirely satisfactory.  We took no prisoners—­ a feature at once barbaric and unconvincing.  The battles lingered on a long time, because we shot with extreme care and deliberation, and they were hard to bring to a decisive finish.  The guns were altogether too predominant.  They prevented attacks getting home, and they made it possible for a timid player to put all his soldiers out of sight behind hills and houses, and bang away if his opponent showed as much as the tip of a bayonet.  Monsieur Bloch seemed vindicated, and Little War had become impossible.  And there was something a little absurd, too, in the spectacle of a solitary drummer-boy, for example, marching off with a gun.

But as there was nevertheless much that seemed to us extremely pretty and picturesque about the game, we set to work—­and here a certain Mr M. with his brother, Captain M., hot from the Great War in South Africa, came in most helpfully—­to quicken it.  Manifestly the guns had to be reduced to manageable terms.  We cut down the number of shots per move to four, and we required that four men should be within six inches of a gun for it to be in action at all.  Without four men it could neither fire nor move—­it was out of action; and if it moved, the four men had to go with it.  Moreover, to put an end to that little resistant body of men behind a house, we required that after a gun had been fired it should remain, without alteration of the elevation, pointing in the direction of its last shot, and have two men placed one on either side of the end of its trail.  This secured a certain exposure on the part of concealed and sheltered gunners.  It was no longer possible to go on shooting out of a perfect security for ever.  All this favoured the attack and led to a livelier game.