Many a private grown hard of flesh and tense of muscle, with his scant rations and meagre covering in the cold nights, with his long marches and fruitless risks and futile fightings, when he is shot down, has little consolation, save in the fact that the thing he and his comrades and the regiment and the army set out to do is done.  If he has to do so, he gives his life with a stony sense of loss which has none of the composure of those who have solace in thinking that what they leave behind has a constantly decreasing value.  And here and there some simple soul, more gifted than his comrades, may touch off the meaning of it all, as it appears to those who hold their lives in their hands for a nation’s sake, by a stroke of mordant comment.

So it was with that chess-playing private from New Zealand of whom Barry Whalen told Ian Stafford.  He told it a few days after Rudyard Byng had won that fight at Hetmeyer’s Kopje, which had enabled the Master Player to turn the flank of the Boers, though there was yet grim frontal work to do against machines of Death, carefully hidden and masked on the long hillsides, which would take staggering toll of Britain’s manhood.

“From behind Otago there in New Zealand, he came,” began Barry, “as fine a fella of thirty-three as ever you saw.  Just come, because he heard old Britain callin’.  Down he drops the stock-whip, away he shoves the plough, up he takes his little balance from the bank, sticks his chess-box in his pocket, says ‘so-long’ to his girl, and treks across the world, just to do his whack for the land that gave him and all his that went before him the key to civilization, and how to be happy though alive....  He was the real thing, the ne plus ultra, the I-stand-alone.  The other fellas thought him the best of the best.  He was what my father used to call ‘a wide man.’  He was in and out of a fight with a quirk at the corner of his mouth, as much as to say, ’I’ve got the hang of this, and it’s different from what I thought; but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t got to be done, and done in style.  It’s the has-to-be.’  And when they got him where he breathes, he fished out the little ivory pawn and put it on a stone at his head, to let it tell his fellow-countrymen how he looked at it—­that he was just a pawn in the great game.  The game had to be played, and won, and the winner had to sacrifice his pawns.  He was one of the sacrifices.  Well, I’d like a tombstone the same as that fella from New Zealand, if I could win it as fair, and see as far.”

Stafford raised his head with a smile of admiration.  “Like the ancients, like the Oriental Emperors to-day, he left his message.  An Alexander, with not one world conquered.”

“I’m none so sure of that,” was Barry’s response.  “A man that could put such a hand on himself as he did has conquered a world.  He didn’t want to go, but he went as so many have gone hereabouts.  He wanted to stay, but he went against his will, and—­and I wish that the grub-hunters, and tuft-hunters, and the blind greedy majority in England could get hold of what he got hold of.  Then life ’d be a different thing in Thamesfontein and the little green islands.”