Of the hardships of the march, of the hunger and thirst—once a battle was fought for two days before a drop of water could be obtained—of the fever and exhaustion, I could guess from watching the speakers, and from the men’s talk to each other I heard of the skilfully posted machine guns alert for a fleeting glimpse of troops grouped, perhaps, round a wounded man, of the snipers in the trees, of the maxims fired from the backs of animals clothed in grass, of the danger of horrors and mutilation should a wounded man fall into the hands of the Askari. All of this I was told freely; but of the endurance, the magnificent self-oblation, the comradeship and devotion, these came to my ears only from those who had commanded troops and who could barely speak of these things for a catch in the throat. The actual warfare, the battles, the bayonet charges, the fervour and courage of attack—these are described by newspaper correspondents in cables and despatches; but of the more human side—‘the soul of the war’—few tales reach the outside world. The courage of endurance, the absence of one word of complaint from men so weak, latterly, that five miles a day sometimes had to be the limit of their march—who shall tell of these? Hear one last story from an outsider. ‘That regiment of yours is very thick with its companion regiment, the Nth,’ he said. ‘A chap who is in the Nth told me the one regiment never loses a chance of doing the other a good turn. Once, he said, the Nth were in the first firing line, only 150 yards from the enemy. There had been no chance of getting water-bottles filled, and the men’s tongues were swollen with thirst. The other chaps were suffering a lot too, but what do you think they did? All the regiment, officers and men, sent up every bottle that had a drain left in it to the fellows of the Nth, and mind you this was done under continuous fire. Pretty fine, wasn’t it?’ A bugle call, a whistle, and the short breathing space is past. Faces lean over the bulwarks, pink and boyish beside the thin and often haggard brown, hands are waved and with songs and cheers the old regiment, reinforced with its recruits, sways slowly and steams into the blue. Were the whole history of the war ever to be written, were the myriad glorious deeds ever to be chronicled, would the world itself contain the books that should be written? _COQ-D’OR: A LETTER TO A SOUL._ BY R. C. T.