arms wearied with holding
the kick of the leaping Martini. The Company Commanders peered
helplessly through the smoke, the more nervous mechanically trying to
fan it away with their helmets.

'High and to the left!' bawled a Captain till he was hoarse. 'No good!
Cease firing, and let it drift away a bit.'

Three and four times the bugles shrieked the order, and when it was
obeyed the Fore and Aft looked that their foe should be lying before
them in mown swaths of men. A light wind drove the smoke to leeward,
and showed the enemy still in position and apparently unaffected. A
quarter of a ton of lead had been buried a furlong in front of them,
as the ragged earth attested.

That was not demoralising to the Afghans, who have not European
nerves. They were waiting for the mad riot to die down, and were
firing quietly into the heart of the smoke. A private of the Fore and
Aft spun up his company shrieking with agony, another was kicking the
earth and gasping, and a third, ripped through the lower intestines by
a jagged bullet, was calling aloud on his comrades to put him out of
his pain. These were the casualties, and they were not soothing to
hear or see. The smoke cleared to a dull haze.

Then the foe began to shout with a great shouting, and a mass--a black
mass--detached itself from the main body, and rolled over the ground
at horrid speed. It was composed of, perhaps, three hundred men, who
would shout and fire and slash if the rush of their fifty comrades who
were determined to die carried home. The fifty were Ghazis,
half-maddened with drugs and wholly mad with religious fanaticism.
When they rushed the British fire ceased, and in the lull the order
was given to close ranks and meet them with the bayonet.

Any one who knew the business could have told the Fore and Aft that
the only way of dealing with a Ghazi rush is by volleys at long
ranges; because a man who means to die, who desires to die, who will
gain heaven by dying, must, in nine cases out of ten, kill a man who
has a lingering prejudice in favour of life. Where they should have
closed and gone forward, the Fore and Aft opened out and skirmished,
and where they should have opened out and fired, they closed and
waited.

A man dragged from his blankets half awake and unfed is never in a
pleasant frame of mind. Nor does his happiness increase when he
watches the whites of the eyes of three hundred six-foot fiends upon
whose beards the foam is lying, up