Lord Charles I only know; Bill--I won’t call him Lord William any more--has been my comrade _per mare et terras_ for more years than either he or I care to reckon. I met him first on a night march in the autumn manœuvres on Salisbury Plain in August 1872. He was then a “galloper” to the general commanding the cavalry brigade. General and brigade had lost their way in the darkness, and Bill got the order to go and find it. He was riding a violent cross-grained mare, which resented being forced to leave the other horses. I gave him a lead for a little way. As I turned, his mare reared straight on end; I knew it, dark as it was, because her fore-foot touched my shoulder. Then there was a thud on the short thick grass carpeting the chalk of the great plain. The brute had “come over” on Bill. There was a groan, but it was from the mare as she fell heavily, not from her rider. He was out from under her somehow before she began to struggle, was in the saddle as she scrambled to her feet, gave her the spur, and forced the cowed brute at a gallop out into the darkness. Bill and I went up the gruesome Khyber Pass together, in November 1878, with the little army which gallant one-armed old Sir Sam Browne led to the invasion of Afghanistan. Across the narrowest gut of that gloomy defile, perched high on its isolated rock, stands the fortress of Ali Musjid, held against us by a strong Afghan garrison. Ali Musjid was the impediment which had to be subdued before we could penetrate farther into the bowels of the Afghan land. Two long broken ridges reach up to the base of the Ali Musjid rock, separated from each other by the valley down the centre of which flows, or rather rushes, the Khyber stream. At the head of one brigade Sir Sam himself moved on the fortress along the rugged right-hand ridge; the other brigade, commanded by General Appleyard, had its route along the left-hand upland. Rather late in the day, when the force was fully committed to this movement, it became apparent that because of the intervening ravine, quick inter-communication with Appleyard was rendered difficult. The Afghans in the fort were no fools; they had recognised the existence of the interval between the two brigades; and they did their level best to keep the force bisected by pouring a steady stream of artillery and musketry down the valley. Sir Sam wanted to send a message to Appleyard. Beresford, who was then an aide-de-camp to the Viceroy of India, and had got a month’s leave from his duties in that capacity to take a hand in what fighting might occur, was a sort of “odd man” on Sir Sam’s staff. He never was oppressed with shyness, and when Sir Sam spoke of his wish to communicate with the left brigade, he put in his word. “I’m an idle man, sir; won’t you send me across to General Appleyard to tell him what you want him to do?”