night.'

And so it happened amid laughter and shoutings that my well-considered
commissariat melted away to reappear later at the mess-table, which
was a waterproof sheet spread on the ground. The flying column had
taken three days' rations with it, and there be few things nastier
than government rations--especially when government is experimenting
with German toys. Erbswurst, tinned beef of surpassing tinniness,
compressed vegetables, and meat-biscuits may be nourishing, but what
Thomas Atkins needs is bulk in his inside. The Major, assisted by his
brother officers, purchased goats for the camp and so made the
experiment of no effect. Long before the fatigue-party sent to collect
brushwood had returned, the men were settled down by their valises,
kettles and pots had appeared from the surrounding country and were
dangling over fires as the kid and the compressed vegetable bubbled
together; there rose a cheerful clinking of mess-tins; outrageous
demands for 'a little more stuffin' with that there liver-wing'; and
gust on gust of chaff as pointed as a bayonet and as delicate as a
gun-butt.

'The boys are in a good temper,' said the Major. 'They'll be singing
presently. Well, a night like this is enough to keep them happy.'

Over our heads burned the wonderful Indian stars, which are not all
pricked in on one plane, but, preserving an orderly perspective, draw
the eye through the velvet darkness of the void up to the barred doors
of heaven itself. The earth was a gray shadow more unreal than the
sky. We could hear her breathing lightly in the pauses between the
howling of the jackals, the movement of the wind in the tamarisks, and
the fitful mutter of musketry-fire leagues away to the left. A native
woman from some unseen hut began to sing, the mail-train thundered
past on its way to Delhi, and a roosting crow cawed drowsily. Then
there was a belt-loosening silence about the fires, and the even
breathing of the crowded earth took up the story.

The men, full fed, turned to tobacco and song,--their officers with
them. The subaltern is happy who can win the approval of the musical
critics in his regiment, and is honoured among the more intricate
step-dancers. By him, as by him who plays cricket cleverly, Thomas
Atkins will stand in time of need, when he will let a better officer
go on alone. The ruined tombs of forgotten Mussulman saints heard the
ballad of _Agra Town_, _The Buffalo Battery_, _Marching to Kabul_,
_The