e children," I said. "It was a murder of
children.... _By children!_"

My horror passed insensibly. I have to feel the dreadfulness of these
things, I told myself, because it is good for such a creature as I to
feel them dreadful, but if one understood it would all be simple. Not
dreadful at all. I clung to that and repeated it,--"it would all be
perfectly simple." It would come out no more horrible than the things
that used to frighten me as a child,--the shadow on the stairs, the
white moonrise reflected on a barked and withered tree, a peculiar dream
of moving geometrical forms, an ugly illustration in the "Arabian
Nights." ...

I do not know how long I wrestled with God and prayed that night, but
abruptly the shadows broke; and very suddenly and swiftly my spirit
seemed to flame up into space like some white beacon that is set alight.
Everything became light and clear and confident. I was assured that all
was well with us, with us who lived and fought and with the dead who
rotted now in fifty thousand hasty graves....

For a long time it seemed I was repeating again and again with soundless
lips and finding the deepest comfort in my words:--"And out of our
agonies comes victory, out of our agonies comes victory! Have pity on
us, God our Father!"

I think that mood passed quite insensibly from waking to a kind of
clear dreaming. I have an impression that I fell asleep and was aroused
by a gun. Yet I was certainly still sitting up when I heard that gun.

I was astonished to find things darkly visible about me. I had not noted
that the stars were growing pale until the sound of this gun very far
away called my mind back to the grooves in which it was now accustomed
to move. I started into absolute wakefulness. A gun?...

I found myself trying to see my watch.

I heard a slipping and clatter of pebbles near me, and discovered Fred
Maxim at my side. "Look!" he said, hoarse with excitement. "Already!" He
pointed to a string of dim little figures galloping helter-skelter over
the neck and down the gap in the hills towards us.

They came up against the pale western sky, little nodding swaying black
dots, and flashed over and were lost in the misty purple groove towards
us. They must have been riding through the night--the British following.
To them we were invisible. Behind us was the shining east, we were in a
shadow still too dark to betray us.

In a moment I was afoot and called out to the men, my philosophy, m