"And wherefore?"

"Because we cannot come nigh unto them. But I, I have slain many men."

"And what is your village?" asks my friend, Major D----, of the I.M.S.

"Chorah."

"Why, I was there in the Tirah campaign."

"Even so, sahib."

The Ghurkhas looked on in silence at our symposium, their broad
Mongolian faces inscrutable. But Shiva Lal, a Brahmin surgeon, who all
this while has been eager to speak, for he is a pundit, and loves the
sound of his own voice, here thrust forward his quaint countenance,
whose walrus-like moustache conceals a row of teeth projecting like the
spokes of a wicker-basket. Softly he rubs his hands and thus he speaks
in English: "Sahib, I had charge of a German sahib--wounded. And I said
unto him, 'How is it that you, who are Christians, treat the Tommies
so? We' (Major D---- looks at me with the hint of a twinkle in his
eye--for has he not told me at mess of that surprising change in the
Indian vernacular whereby their speech is no longer of "Goora-log" and
"Sahib-log" but of "We," which fraternal pronoun is significant of
much)--'we shave you and feed you, we wash you and dress your wounds,
even as one of ourselves, and you kill our wounded Tommies, yea, and do
these things and worse even unto women. Are you not Christians? We'
(there is a return to old habits of speech)--'we are only Indians, but I
have read in your Bible that if one smite on the one cheek'"--here Shiva
Lal, who has now what he loves most in the world, an audience, and is
easily histrionic, smites his face mightily on the right side--"'one
should turn to him the other. Why is this?'"

"And what said the German officer, Shiva Lal?"

"Nay, sahib, he said nothing." We also say nothing. For Shiva Lal needs
but little encouragement to talk from sunset to cock-crow. Perhaps the
unfortunate German officer divined as much. But the spell of Shiva Lal's
eloquence is rudely broken by Major D----, who takes me by the arm to go
elsewhere. And the little group squatting on their haunches at their
mid-day meal cease listening and dip their _chupattis_ in the aromatic
_dhal_, in that slow, ruminant, ritualistic way in which the Indian
always eats his food.

"_Ram, Ram! Tumhi kothun alle?_" said my friend Smith, turning aside to
a lonely figure on my right. A cry of joy escapes a dark-featured
Mahratta who has been looking mournfully on from his bed of pain,
comprehending nothing of these dialogues. We have, indeed, been talking