Drift, he acknowledged the error with the manly frankness which was but one of the fine features of a noble character. I had sworn to my hurt, but unless I ate dirt there could be no withdrawal. When, before starting, I went to Sir Evelyn Wood to ask for his home messages, he would have detained me, but that in a word I told him how I must go; he understood, bade me Godspeed, and let me go. There was no sentiment about his limb of an aide-de-camp--“the boy,” as we called him. As I turned from Wood’s tent “the boy” shouted an offer to bet me five pounds I would not get through. “Done!” I cried. “Ah!” quoth “the boy,” with a regard for his pound of flesh beyond his years, “you must put the money down, for I don’t in the least expect to see you back again.” So I posted my fiver and rode away into the dense all but trackless bush, just as the great red sun touched the westward ridge overhanging the Umvaloosi gorge. I had “got through” and been back in England some time, when it occurred to me to claim the Zulu medal. A war medal is not a decoration in the sense that the Albert medal, or the “C.I.E.” or the “D.S.O.,” or that proud symbol the “C.M.G.,” is a decoration. The medal for a campaign once granted, a military person of whatever rank is entitled to it as a right who has been inside hostile territory in the course of the campaign; he need not have been under fire, or indeed within miles of a battle. In the Zulu business many got the medal who had never crossed the Natal frontier, and the whole wing of a regiment received the Ashantee medal that never disembarked at all. I found copious precedents in favour of civilians being the recipients of war medals. William Howard Russell has the Crimean and Indian medals. A British Museum _employé_ who accompanied the expedition to pick up specimens for that institution received the Abyssinian medal. The Victoria Cross was given to four civilians for gallant acts in the Indian Mutiny, and the Mutiny medal to all civilians who were under fire. It was worn by a lady lately dead, who was born in the Lucknow Residency during the siege, and earned it by that achievement. I did not presume to claim the Zulu medal in virtue of having made the campaign as a correspondent, but because of a specific service for which I had received the thanks of the local commander-in-chief. True, a claim I had put in for the Afghan medal had been rejected on the specified ground that “the Secretary of State is of opinion that the service on the performance of which that claim is based was not of a character which would entitle you to the medal.” But then that “service” was merely the having been mentioned in his despatch by the commanding General for saving life in action--a ground surely not to be mentioned in the same day with the acknowledgment of a superior General’s gratitude. So my claim went in to the War Office based on the ride from Ulundi to the telegraph-office, and the results thereof set forth above.