way.” “The whole area was swept by a storm of bullets.” Stronger words could not have been used by an enthusiastic war correspondent gushing his level best about his first skirmish; General Hamley’s expressions are fuller-volumed than those used by the compilers of the German staff chronicle in describing that Titanic paroxysm the climax of Gravelotte. What stupendous damage, then, did this hottest of all hot fires, this hurricane of bullets, effect? The casualties of the whole division reached a total of 258 killed and wounded. Of these, “nearly 200,” General Hamley distinctly states, occurred exclusively in the first brigade in the rush up to the entrenchment. If we assume that the second brigade had no losses at all, and that the whole balance of casualties occurred to the first brigade when in “the triangle of fire,” the fall of some 60 men out of 2800 was hardly a loss to justify the “recoil even to the edge of the entrenchment” of troops possessed even of a moderate amount of fire-discipline. General Hamley explains that but for the darkness and the too high aim of the enemy, “the losses would have been tremendous.” In other words, if an actual loss of 2 per cent, and the turmoil of the hottest fire imaginable, yet fortunately aimed over their heads, caused the troops “to recoil even to the edge of the entrenchment,” the “tremendous losses” that a better-aimed fire would have produced, it seems pretty evident, would have caused them to “recoil” so much farther that Tel-el-Kebir would have been a defeat instead of a victory. The Egyptians did not shoot straight because they were flurried, that is, were deficient in fire-discipline; our men “recoiled” after a very brief experience of a devilish but comparatively harmless battle-din, because the ardour of the first rush having died out of them, fire-discipline was not strong enough in them to keep them braced to hold the ground the rush had won them. It was fortunate that in Hamley they had a chief who had prescience of their feebleness of constancy, and had taken measures to remedy its evil effects.