in the road; and here were puddles too—­puddles of blood.  A gunner lifted away the corpse of his nearest friend from the trail and strained and wrenched at his gun with the intense concentration of one who kneads dough in a trough.  The sobbing agony of those whom Stafford had led rose up from the ground around him, and voices cried to be put out of pain and torture.  These begrimed men around him, with jackets torn by bullets, with bandaged head stained with blood or dragging leg which left a track of blood behind, were not the men who last night were chatting round the camp-fires and making bets as to where the attack would begin to-day.

Stafford was cool enough, however.  It was as though an icy liquid had been poured into his veins.  He thought more clearly than he had ever done, even in those critical moments of his past when cool thinking was indispensable.  He saw the mistake that had been made in giving his battery work which might have been avoided, and with the same result to the battle; but he also saw the way out of it, and he gave orders accordingly.  When the horses were lashed to a gallop to take up the new position, which, if they reached, would give them shelter against this fiendish rain of lead, and also enable them to enfilade the foe at advantage, something suddenly brought confusion to his senses, and the clear thinking stopped.  His being seemed to expand suddenly to an enormity of chaos and then as suddenly to shrink, dwindle, and fall back into a smother—­as though, in falling, blankets were drawn roughly over his head and a thousand others were shaken in the air around him.  And both were real in their own way.  The thousand blankets flapping in the air were the machine guns of the foe following his battery into a zone of less dreadful fire, and the blankets that smothered him were wrappings of unconsciousness which save us from the direst agonies of body and mind.

The last thing he saw, as his eyes, with a final effort of power, sought to escape from this sudden confusion, was a herd of springboks flinging themselves about in the circle of fire, caught in the struggle of the two armies, and, like wild birds in a hurricane, plunging here and there in flight and futile motion.  As unconsciousness enwrapped him the vision of these distraught denizens of the veld was before his eyes.  Somehow, in a lightning transformation, he became one with them and was mingled with them.

Time passed.

When his eyes opened again, slowly, heavily, the same vision was before him—­the negative left on the film of his sight by his last conscious glance at the world.

He raised himself on his elbow and looked out over the veld.  The springboks were still distractedly tossing here and there, but the army to which he belonged had moved on.  It was now on its way up the hill lying between them and the Besieged City.  He was dimly conscious of this, for the fight round him had ceased, the storm had gone forward.  There was noise, great noise, but he was outside of it, in a kind of valley of awful inactivity.  All round him was the debris of a world in which he had once lived and moved and worked.  How many years—­or centuries—­was it since he had been in that harvest of death?  There was no anomaly.  It was not that time had passed; it was that his soul had made so far a journey.