ses of
a life, an adventure, a country with which I should later have some
concern but whose boundaries I was not yet to cross. Now, suddenly,
whether it was because of the dark and the silence I cannot say, I had
become, myself, an actor in the affair. It was not simply that we were
given something definite to do--we had had wounded during the
morning--it was rather that, as in the children's game we were "hot,"
we had drawn in a moment close to some one or something of whose
presence we were quite distinctly aware. As we walked across the yard
into the long low field, speaking in whispers, watching a shaft of
light, perhaps some distant projector that trembled in pale white
shadows on the horizon, we seemed to me to be, in actual truth, the
hunters of Trenchard's dream.

Never, surely, before, had I known the world so silent. Under the
hedges that lined the field there were soldiers like ghosts; our own
wagons, with the sanitars walking beside them, moved across the ground
without even the creak of a wheel. Semyonov was to meet us in an
hour's time at a certain crossroad. I was given the command of the
party. I was now, in literal truth, breathlessly excited. My heart was
beating in my breast like some creature who makes running leaps at
escape. My tongue was dry and my brain hot. But I was happy ... happy
with a strange exaltation that was unlike any emotion that I had known
before. It was in part the happiness that I had known sometimes in
Rugby football or in tennis when the players were evenly matched and
the game hard, but it was more than that. It had in it something of
the happiness that I have known, after many days at sea, on the first
view of land--but it was more than that. Something of the happiness of
possessing, at last, some object which one has many days desired and
never hoped to attain--but more, too, than that. Something of the
happiness of danger or pain that one has dreaded and finds, in actual
truth, give way before one's resolution--but more, again, than that.
This happiness, this exultation that I felt now but dimly, and was to
know more fully afterwards (but never, alas, as my companions were to
know it) is the subject of this book. The scent of it, the full
revelation of it, has not, until now, been my reward; I can only, as a
spectator, watch that revelation as it came afterwards to others more
fortunate than I. But what I write is the truth as far as I, from the
outside, have seen it. If i