Hundreds saw the two make their way across the veld, across the lead-swept plain; but such things in the hour of battle are commonplaces; they are taken as part of the awful game.  Neither mauser nor shrapnel nor maxim brought them down as they made their way to the abandoned gun beside which Stafford lay.  Yet only one reached Stafford’s side, where he was stretched among his dead comrades.  The surgeon stayed his course at three-quarters of the distance to care for a gunner whose mutilations were robbed of half their horror by a courage and a humour which brought quick tears to Al’mah’s eyes.  With both legs gone the stricken fellow asked first for a match to light his cutty pipe and then remarked:  “The saint’s own luck that there it was with the stem unbroke to give me aise whin I wanted it!

“Shure, I thought I was dead,” he added as the surgeon stooped over him, “till I waked up and give meself the lie, and got a grip o’ me pipe, glory be!”

With great difficulty Al’mah dragged Stafford under the horseless gun, left behind when the battery moved on.  Both forces had thought that nothing could live in that gray-brown veld, and no effort at first was made to rescue or take it.  By every law of probability Al’mah and the young surgeon ought to be lying dead with the others who had died, some with as many as twenty bullet wounds in their bodies, while the gunner, who had served this gun to the last and then, alone, had stood at attention till the lead swept him down, had thirty wounds to his credit for England’s sake.  Under the gun there was some shade, for she threw over it a piece of tarpaulin and some ragged, blood-stained jackets lying near—­jackets of men whose wounds their comrades had tried hastily to help when the scythe of war cut them down.

There was shade now, but there was not safety, for the ground was spurting dust where bullets struck, and even bodies of dead men were dishonoured by the insult of new wounds and mutilations.

Al’mah thought nothing of safety, but only of this life which was ebbing away beside her.  She saw that a surgeon could do nothing, that the hurt was internal and mortal; but she wished him not to die until she had spoken with him once again and told him all there was to tell—­all that had happened after he left Brinkwort’s Farm yesterday.

She looked at the drawn and blanched face and asked herself if that look of pain and mortal trouble was the precursor of happiness and peace.  As she bathed the forehead of the wounded man, it suddenly came to her that here was the only tragedy connected with Stafford’s going:  his work was cut short, his usefulness ended, his hand was fallen from the lever that lifted things.

She looked away from the blanched face to the field of battle, towards the sky above it.  Circling above were the vile aasvogels, the loathsome birds which followed the track of war, watching, waiting till they could swoop upon the flesh blistering in the sun.  Instinctively she drew nearer to the body of the dying man, as though to protect it from the evil flying things.  She forced between his lips a little more water.