It was only one more wave of fanatical, unthinking, misdirected barbarism broken again as it tried to wash back the advance of civilization, and civilization cannot and must not cease to roll back such waves, in the eternal progress of the world. I remembered the day I had walked so jauntily out of the Admiralty with every contempt for the roar and bustle of traffic and trade, and every nerve tingling with delight at soon leaving it for the edge of civilization; and now that I was there, and had done a man’s work with the tools and engines of war which civilization had put in my hand, I was neither pleased nor proud. It was all too cruel, too brutal, all so meaningless and useless a waste of life. These men had died because we prevented them, by every means in our power, from obtaining more rifles. They only wanted them to carry on their family and tribal blood feuds, to raid other tribes, and to shoot our own soldiers across the Indian frontier. But to these poor wretches this was their whole duty in life, and they knew that the telegraph-cable was one of their chief enemies—it could give warning of attempts to land arms; it could summon ships from below the horizon to prevent them being landed: so they had laid down their lives in the endeavour to destroy it, and had left their waiting wives to teach their fatherless children black hatred of the white man, and to bring them up with the one idea, later on, when they were big enough to hold a rifle, of trying to revenge their fathers’ deaths and beat back—in their turn—advancing civilization. Standing among all these heaped-up corpses I could not help thinking what a wailing there would be when these grand men did not return to their village fastnesses in those grim mountains standing up like a huge wall against the horizon. A rifle suddenly went off close to me. Turning, I saw Webster open his breech and jerk out a cartridge. "A wounded chap tried to stab me, sir," he said in explanation. That was the worst part of it. The wounded never expected anything but death, and wanted revenge before they died. It was not the slightest use trying to attend to their wounds, in fact it was dangerous to go anywhere near a man, even though he looked as dead as a stone—he might only be pretending to be dead and waiting his opportunity for you to get close. I ought to have given orders for my men to go round and shoot every one with any sign of life in him, but this I absolutely refused to do. The poor, ignorant wretches should have the chance of crawling down among their own people—if they could. I called my men away, and, carefully avoiding every patch of tumbled, distorted bodies, went up to speak to Mr. Fisher, whom I saw coming towards me—still in his pyjamas—a revolver in his hand. He was quite cool. "Thank you very much!" he said simply. "How is Miss Borsen," I asked eagerly, "and your wife?" but he did not know. He had not seen them since the first alarm.