It was an extraordinary epistle to look at, very thick, and its envelope was an old official one that had been carefully ungummed and refolded wrong side out. And it had come from a tiny village on the banks of the Jhelum River, far away in India. But what was more extraordinary still, its owner received it that very day. For Khundadad Khan had become a very great man indeed, and his name was fully as well known in London then, as ever it had been in his native village. Lying in the Kensington hospital, he stroked his long black curly beard, the exact color of his hair, and murmured, as he fingered the bulky contents of the letter (a parchment verse from the _Koran_ tied up in silk with a dried serpent’s fang), “Oh, yes, it is a very good tawíz—charm—as such things go, and will no doubt keep off many demons. But the King-Emperor has given me a better one, is it not so, my friend?” [Illustration: © _American Press Association._ Second-Line Gurkhas Coming Up From whatever tribe they came they proved themselves worthy to fight in any army of Europe, as the “V. C.’s” awarded to the members of the Indian army show. The photograph shows the second line advancing amid shell fire to the reinforcement of the first line at captured German trench.] “Undoubtedly, oh son of a most high excellence,” replied the little brown orderly respectfully, in Hindustanie. And it was so. For the king had given him the highest military honor of Great Britain, the V. C., the first ever bestowed upon a member of the Indian Army. What he had done to win it sounds like many another brave deed recounted of the men in the Great War. There is a similarity even in brave deeds. He had remained in a trench, firing a Maxim, after his British captain and all the men with him were killed or wounded, holding back the Germans until he, too, fell, severely wounded, and they passed on over his body. But the Germans had been held back, and that was the important point. THE BROWN MEN It was in August that the brown men first took ship at Calcutta and Bombay, and, leaving the sound of temple bell and muezzin, and commending themselves, no doubt, to Ava Ardu Sur Jasan, the angel presiding over the sea and great voyages, sailed away under the British Jack to fight for the Empire in a land they had never seen. They reached the Western front in September, and after a scant two weeks’ rest, were thrown in beside the almost exhausted British in the flat mud-country between Givenchy and Neuve Chapelle. The force consisted of about 50,000 British and 65,000 native Indians, led by white officers, and with native officers to act as go-betweens. It was the first time, since the Moors had conquered Spain, long before Columbus sailed for America, that brown men and white had engaged in a death-grapple on European soil. But these brown men were from a continent, not a single nation.