The Woordie-Major replied: "Sahib, never was there a war like this war, since the world began. No, not even the Mahabharata when Kouro fought Pandu." Then spoke up a subadar of the Pioneers, a tall Sikh with his beard curled like the ancient Assyrians. He had shown me the five symbols of the Sikh freemasonry--nay, he had taken the _kangha_ out of his hair and shown me the two little knives, also the hair-ring and the bracelet, and had unwound the spirals of his unshaven locks. Therefore we were friends. "All wars are but _shikkar_ to this war, sahib." "Shikkar?" "Yea, even as a tiger-hunt. But this, this is an exceeding great war." "Nay, this is a fine war--a hell of a fine war." The speaker was an Afridi from Tirah, whose strongly marked aquiline features reminded me of nothing so much as a Jewish pawnbroker in Whitechapel. He lacks every virtue except courage, and his one regret is that he has missed the family blood-feud. There have been great doings in his family on the frontier in his absence--two abductions and one homicide. "If I had not come home," his brother has written reproachfully to him from Tirah, "things had gone ill with us. But never mind about all this now. Do your duty well." And even so has he done. "And how like you this war?" "Sahib, it is a fine war, a hell of a fine war, but for the great guns." "And wherefore?" "Because we cannot come nigh unto them. But I, I have slain many men." "And what is your village?" asks my friend, Major D----, of the I.M.S. "Chorah." "Why, I was there in the Tirah campaign." "Even so, sahib." The Ghurkhas looked on in silence at our symposium, their broad Mongolian faces inscrutable. But Shiva Lal, a Brahmin surgeon, who all this while has been eager to speak, for he is a pundit, and loves the sound of his own voice, here thrust forward his quaint countenance, whose walrus-like moustache conceals a row of teeth projecting like the spokes of a wicker-basket. Softly he rubs his hands and thus he speaks in English: "Sahib, I had charge of a German sahib--wounded. And I said unto him, 'How is it that you, who are Christians, treat the Tommies so? We' (Major D---- looks at me with the hint of a twinkle in his eye--for has he not told me at mess of that surprising change in the Indian vernacular whereby their speech is no longer of "Goora-log" and "Sahib-log" but of "We," which fraternal pronoun is significant of much)--'we shave you and feed you, we wash you and dress your wounds, even as one of ourselves, and you kill our wounded Tommies, yea, and do these things and worse even unto women. Are you not Christians? We' (there is a return to old habits of speech)--'we are only Indians, but I have read in your Bible that if one smite on the one cheek'"--here Shiva Lal, who has now what he loves most in the world, an audience, and is easily histrionic, smites his face mightily on the right side--"'one should turn to him the other. Why is this?'"