The bearer, too, has played up well when he has had the chance. During the retirement from Ctesiphon the last batch of boats to leave Kut just before the siege came in for a good deal of sniping. One of them put ashore at a bend, and landed a party which took up a position on the bank and tried to keep down the enemy's fire. This was very early in the morning. "It was quite a hot corner," an officer told me. "I had spotted a man who had crawled up to within a hundred and fifty yards of us, and was drawing a bead on him. I had clean forgotten the boat, and Kut, and the retreat, and all the rest of it, when I heard a familiar voice behind me, 'Tea ready, sorr.' It was good old Dubru, my Madrasi bearer, who had come up under fire. The tea was good and the buttered toast still hot. His only remark when I had finished it was 'Master like another cup?' I should have been very unhappy if the old fellow had been hit." I could multiply instances of the providence that keeps the follower to his prescribed task, whether in emergency or in the ordinary day's work. A medical officer was going round his camp during a bombardment, to see that his staff were taking cover. He found the infection ward in a great state of perturbation--not from fright as might have been expected. The trouble was a violation of the rules. "Sir," a Babu explained to him, "it is a serious matter, no doubt, two contact cases have escaped confinement of ward." It was his way of saying that two men with mumps had had the sense to discover a funkhole and make themselves scarce. The name of the sweeper is associated with chivalry in an ironic sense only. His Indian titles "Mehtar" and "Jemadar" are facetiously honorific, as when one speaks of him as "the knight." Yet the sweeper has won laurels in the war. It was at Givenchy, I think, at the very beginning of things, when cartridges were jammed in the magazines, and men were wanted to take ramrods to the front, and there were no spare combatants for errands of this kind, that the sweepers carried the ramrods over the open ground with no cover of communication trenches to the men in the firing line. In Mesopotamia a sweeper of the --th Rifles took an unauthorised part in an assault on the Turkish lines, picked up the rifle of a dead sepoy, and went on firing until he was shot in the head.