To tell of all that journey across Persia would be but to remember weariness—­weariness of horse and men.  Sometimes we were attacked; more often we were run away from.  We grew sick, our wounds festered and our hearts ached.  Horses died and the vultures ate them.  Men died, and we buried or burned their bodies according or not as we had fuel.  We dried, as it were, like the bone-dry trail we followed, and only Ranjoor Singh’s heart was stout; only he was brave; only he had a song on his lips.  He coaxed us, and cheered us, and rallied us.  The strength of the regiment was but his strength, and as for the other party, who hung on our flank, or lagged behind us or preceded us by half a day, their Kurds deserted by fives and tens until there was scarcely a corporal’s guard remaining.

They must have been as weary as we, and as glad as we when at last at the end of a long drawn afternoon, we saw an Afghan sentry.

Has the sahib ever seen an Afghan sentry?

This one was gray and old and sat on his gray pony like a huddled ape with a tattered umbrella over his shoulder and his rifle across his knees.  He looked less like a sentry than like a dead man dug up and set there to scare the birds away.  But he was efficient, no doubt of that.  He had seen us and passed on word of us the minute we showed on the sky-line, and the hills all about him were full of armed men waiting to give us a hot reception if necessary and to bar farther progress in any case.

So there we had to camp, just over the Afghan border, but farther apart from the Germans than ever—­two, three miles apart, for now it became Ranjoor Singh’s policy to know nothing whatever about them.  The Afghans provided us with rations and sent us one of their own doctors dressed in the uniform of a tram-car conductor, and their highest official in those parts, whose rank I could not guess because he was arrayed in the costume of a city of London policeman, asked innumerable questions, first of Ranjoor Singh and then of each of us individually.  But we conferred together, and stuck to one point, that we knew nothing.  Ranjoor Singh did not know better than we.  The more he asked the more dumb we became until, perhaps with a view to loosing our tongues, the Afghans who mingled among us in the camp began telling what the Germans were saying and doing on the rise two miles away.

They had their machine set up, said they.  They were receiving messages, said they, with this wonderful wireless telegraph of theirs.  They kept receiving hourly news of disasters to the Allied arms by land and sea.  And we were fearfully disturbed about all this, because we knew how important it must be for India’s safety that Afghanistan continue neutral.  And why should such savages continue neutral if they were once persuaded that the winning side was that of the Central Powers?  Nevertheless, Ranjoor Singh continued to grow more and more contented, and I wondered.  Some of the men began to murmur.