s of statuesque silence Mark began to
think that this was a dull game, and he wished that his mother had not
gone to her room with a headache, because if she had been with him she
could have undoubtedly invented, so clever was she, a method of invading
the nursery without either the attackers or the defenders making any
noise about it. In her gentle voice she would have whispered of the
hordes that were stealthily creeping up the mountain side until Mark and
his vigilant cork-bottomed grenadiers would have been in a state of
suppressed exultation ready to die in defence of the nursery, to die
stolidly and silently at their posts with nobody else in the house aware
of their heroism.

"Rorke's Drift," said Mark to himself, trying to fancy that he heard in
the distance a Zulu _impi_ and whispering to his cork-bottomed
grenadiers to keep a good look-out. One of them who was guarding the
play-cupboard fell over on his face, and in the stillness the noise
sounded so loud that Mark did not dare cross the room to put him up
again, but had to assume that he had been shot where he stood. It was no
use. The game was a failure; Mark decided to look at _Battles of the
British Army_. He knew the pictures in every detail, and he could have
recited without a mistake the few lines of explanation at the bottom of
each page; but the book still possessed a capacity to thrill, and he
turned over the pages not pausing over Crecy or Poitiers or Blenheim or
Dettingen; but enjoying the storming of Badajoz with soldiers impaled on
_chevaux de frise_ and lingering over the rich uniforms and plumed
helmets in the picture of Joseph Bonaparte's flight at Vittoria. There
was too a grim picture of the Guards at Inkerman fighting in their
greatcoats with clubbed muskets against thousands of sinister dark green
Russians looming in the snow; and there was an attractive picture of a
regiment crossing the Alma and eating the grapes as they clambered up
the banks where they grew. Finally there was the Redan, a mysterious
wall, apparently of wickerwork, with bombs bursting and broken
scaling-ladders and dead English soldiers in the open space before it.

Mark did not feel that he wanted to look through the book again, and he
put it away, wondering how long that murmur of voices rising and falling
from his father's study below would continue. He wondered whether Dora
would be annoyed if he went down to the kitchen. She had been
discouraging on the last two o