When night came, across the hills and far away in the deep blue, white shaking streams of light poured upward, telling the besieged forces over there at Lordkop that rescue would come, that it was moving on to the mountain.  How many times had this light in the sky flashed the same grave pledge in the mystic code of the heliograph, “We are gaining ground—­we will reach you soon.”  How many times, however, had the message also been, “Not yet—­but soon.”

Men died in this great camp from wounds and from fever, and others went mad almost from sheer despair; yet whenever the Master Player called, they sprang to their places with a new-born belief that he who had been so successful in so many long-past battles would be right in the end with his old rightness, though he had been wrong so often on the Dreitval.

Others there were who were sick of the world and wished “to be well out of it”—­as they said to themselves.  Some had been cruelly injured, and desire of life was dead in them; others had given injury, and remorse had slain peace.  Others still there were who, having done evil all their lives, knew that they could not retrace their steps, and yet shrank from a continuance of the old bad things.

Some indeed, in the red futile sacrifice, had found what they came to find; but some still were left whose recklessness did not avail.  Comrades fell beside them, but, unscathed, they went on fighting.  Injured men were carried in hundreds to the hospitals, but no wounds brought them low.  Bullets were sprayed around them, but none did its work for them.  Shells burst near, yet no savage shard mutilated their bodies.

Of these was Ian Stafford.

Three times he had been in the fore-front of the fight where Death came sweeping down the veld like rain, but It passed him by.  Horses and men fell round his guns, yet he remained uninjured.

He was patient.  If Death would not hasten to meet him, he would wait.  Meanwhile, he would work while he could, but with no thought beyond the day, no vision of the morrow.

He was one of the machines of war.  He was close to his General, he was the beloved of his men, still he was the man with no future; though he studied the campaign with that thoroughness which had marked his last years in diplomacy.

He was much among his own wounded, much with others who were comforted by his solicitude, by the courage of his eye, and the grasp of his firm, friendly hand.  It was at what the soldiers called the Stay Awhile Hospital that he came in living touch again with the life he had left behind.

He knew that Rudyard Byng had come to South Africa; but he knew no more.  He knew that Jasmine had, with Lady Tynemouth, purchased a ship and turned it into a hospital at a day’s notice; but as to whether these two had really come to South Africa, and harboured at the Cape, or Durban, he had no knowledge.  He never looked at the English newspapers which arrived at Dreitval River.  He was done with that old world in which he once worked; he was concerned only for this narrow field where an Empire’s fate was being solved.