unhappiness you had inflioted on your fellows and how many of them you had helped towards happiness. That being so, the transition to a further state where the flaws of humanity were to be left behind should be an entry into happiness, and so, apart from the mere animal shrinking from the unexperienced, a process free from pain or fear.

Consoling thoughts, indeed, if they were true. And some how to the thinker, lying there in the shadows intensified by the glow of the oil-stove, they were true-true because they fitted in with his innate conviction that He who made life meant it to be beautiful, and those who lead it happy.

Then his thoughts slipped back again to that incomprehensible fraction of time when everything had seemed to stand still and all the world seemed hushed to listen to one word from the lips of a man reeling into death as a rifle bullet orashed through his skull.

Why? Why? Why should that instant have somehow touched him, who was in no way connected? Then his brain took to running in simless circles of thought, about everything and nothing, about the sound of bullets as they moan and whine amid the rocky frontier hills, not so much the audible crack or whimper that strikes the physical sense of hearing, but the inaudible psychic sound which tends, if you be highly strung, to take your mind off the work in hand, and calls for utter

self-control, lest you find yourself thinking of nothing else.

His wandering mind circled from picture to picture of the past until at last, just before dawn, he fell into a doze and dreamed of a staff office in the distant peace of the pine-clad Himalayas. It was a vivid dream, and one insistent feature of it was the clamour of the telephone - bell which, placed just outside the door, served for him and three other staff officers.

There W&B a telephone orderly too, who used to answer the bell, and then call whichever officer was wanted, poking his head in at the door to say in the broadest of Wessex

"Zum-an vur tu speak tu yeou, zur."

The dream was vivid, and when the major woke stiff and cramped in the chill dawn, the orderly's phrase was about the most salient memory of the half-remembered dream, and as he opened his eyes he half expected to see the office and hear the telephone-bell.

But instead there was the stuffy tent, the stretohers, the sapper with his foot stuck up, a queer-shaped silhouette, and the Gurkha subaltern still in exactly the same position, his closed eyes, perhaps a little bluer and puffier, and his breathing a little weaker.

The pioqueting troops oleared the road back down stream, and a couple of hours later the long convoy of wounded men slung in kajawahs on camels moved out four and five abreast, led by

a doctor with a first-aid party and a long line of stretchers. And in this wise some 250 useless crocks started out on the first stage of their long journey back to a land flowing with oream and honey, where milk and butter, fruit and vegetables grow naturally in cows and gardens, and not unnaturally in tins, and passing presently out of the shadows of the blood-stained Ahnai tangi into the wider sunlit stretches of the river about Gana Kach, thanked their stars for being still alive and out of it all pro tem.

That night, too, at Kotkai, the major slept but poorly, for his shoulder had stiffened and he could not get comfortable on the narrow stretcher. Again he lay thinking, thinking, and once more the insistent memory of that strange pause, and the recollection of the office telephone surged up continually before his mind, though where the connection lay, for the life of him he could

not see.

had

That telephone - bell worried him rather when he first joined the office-it was so loud and insistent. But one learned to take no notice of it, and in time really not to hear it, anyway with your conscious brain, unless the orderly poked his head in to say the call was for you. Then, and then only, did you take your mind off the work in hand and go out to answer; otherwise the bell might ring all day and leave you undisturbed.

That made him think of the dead man's imperturbability

under fire, a quality one envied so; always intent on the work in hand, and not to be distracted by whimper of passing bullet.

"Bullets... telephone-bells? ... Telephone-bells... bullets?” What on earth was the connection? And still puzzling, he fell into a fitful slumber from which he awoke with a feeling as if he had been groping in the dark for a key that once his fingers had touched but which had slipped away ere he could grasp it.

In the cold morning sunlight the bubbling camels called the wounded to the road once more, somewhat fewer in number, for some were now too bad to move and others had passed beyond all need of moving. But of these last, four came on in the long convoy of kajahwahs which followed the slow moving handborne doolies, since whenever possible British officers were always sent down for burial to Jandola, where their graves lie under the fort out of Mahsud reach.

Down the long road through Palosina, over the stony Spinkai Raghza, passed the slow caravan of pain, until orossing the river it came into Jandola camp, and decanted its wounded into the hospitals and staging sections.

Late that afternoon as the sun was sinking, a heavy mass of red gold in the cloud-flecked sky above the purple hills, a party of Gurkhas of the 3rd Guides came to a halt with click of heels outside the tent which served as mortuary for

A dootor unlaced the fly of the tent and stood back to let the first four men enter. They emerged again slowly, bearing a stretoher on which, covered with a Union Jack, lay a stiff form sewn up in a brown blanket, and moving off a few paces, halted.

Four times was this repeated by successive squads, and then the whole party moved down the path picked out in white stones, which leads through the perimeter to where in a little fence of barbed wire lies Jandola's "God's Aore," extending apace the last few weeks, alas! a tiny bare plot of stony Waziristan soil on a plateau ringed with jagged hills.

As the funeral party passed out of the perimeter a knot of officers standing at the salute fell in and followed silently. Another red-tabbed, goldsplashed group joined in a little farther on, for the Force Commander happened to be in Jandola that day, and with three more Generals came to say farewell to these his officers at the finish of their last journey down.

The chaplain in surplice and stole stood at the head of a line of open graves, and as the stretoher-bearers, passing in where a mixed company of the Guides stood stiffly at the "present," laid their burdens down, broke into the opening words of the Burial Service

"For I am the resurrection and the life," saith the Lord."

The major, standing opposite

"The golden pinions folded down,

Their speed still tokened by the fluttered gown."

That suddenly breathless pause had been the dead man's realisation that this time the call was for him, and then had come the recognition of the caller. The meaning of that half-spoken, half-whispered word seemed very clear now: "Christ!"

Who else, indeed, but the Master and Friend of all the world should greet those who have made the supreme sacrifice, cut short the way of

purgation by mastering the lesson in their utter negation of the claims of self, laying down their lives as things of no value that others might thereby live.

The officers of the Guides stepped forward, and lifting the bodies off the stretchers, lowered them gently one by one into the graves, and the words of the Funeral Service passed on into what is the real farewell from this side:

"In sure and certain hope of the resurrection."

Yes, undoubtedly, the hope is sure and certain: almost the major thought he would word it, "in sure and certain foreknowledge."

The insistent clamour of the "why and wherefore" and wherefore" was hushed now, and things balanced in due proportion as he realised that life is after all a moment's space for a lesson to be learnt. He understood clearly at last that he was only here for just the

space of time his Creator designed for him, and that peace lay in the grasping of the relative values of this small world and the infinity of the other, and while doing with all one's might one's work in the world, yet guarding an everpresent realisation that the call, "Friend, go up higher," may come at any moment, a call to be answered cheerfully and with good heart.

Presently came the rattle of arms of the salute, and then as the fading purple of the hills changed to the indigo of coming night, night, the Guides' bugles broke out into the farewell strains of the "Last Post."

en route for home. Ten days ago General Skeen and the bulk of the staff of Derajat Column, now officially deceased, passed through, and spent the night with us at Sorarogha, to say good-bye to the 2/76th and ourselves, at the corner of the camp where you see the Ahnai hill-tops.

The fields abound in Mah. sads returning to their villages and orops, though gangs of irreconcilables still snipe the picquets now and then. One such collection of desperadoes started a battle with one of our camp picquets the other night, and kept it up well into the small hours, causing a hurried rush to bed in our funk-holes, since the camp was sprinkled impartially with friendly and enemy bullets.

But for some of us that was a memorable night, since we had appeared in orders for leave ex India on the conclusion of operations; and after weeks of waiting, that very afternoon a wire had come through to say that we might go.

We packed our scanty kits, and next morning saw us sweeping down the read in the wake of the convoy picqueting troops. From Ladha, Piazha, Sorarogha, and every camp and picquet in Mahsudland we sprinkled the road: drafts of cheering sepoys on foot, Indian officers on borrowed hospital ponies, British officers in twos and threes on horses and camels, double and treble staging, some pushing ahead, anxious only to shake the dust of Mahsudland off their

VOL. CCVIII.—NO. MCCLXII.

feet, others more slowly, stopping from time to time to take a last look or a photo of some well remembered place of blood stained memory, or to bare their heads in farewell near a peculiar-shaped rook or tree which they knew to mark the other wise unmarked grave of one of those who had fallen by the wayside.

Clattering into Jandola in the afternoon, lo! a motor road and Ford vannettes in scores. We piled ourselves aboard on milk-vans, on ice-ears, in empty Red Cross motors, and raced through the Hinis tangi out into the foothills past Khirgi and Manzai, and so in the stifling heat of the evening to Tank.

Thence by car or rail across the Indus; and in carriages packed with kit and stored with ice, in the full blaze of the Indian hot weather, we sweated unto Bombay, and with fluttering cheque-books and wads of notes laid siege to the shipping offices. All India seemed to be homeward bound with passages booked months and years before, and there seemed but little hope for us down from forgotten Mahsudland. So we had to hang about Bombay, waiting for some peaceful plutocrat to die or miss his train, and so leap from the pier - head into his berth.

But by degrees we got passages-some earlier, some not so early; and one of the lucky ones, I boarded the P. & O. mail, and saw on the deck above me that same cavalry man of the Hinis and Piazha, 3 I