Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/106

94 is it all gathered together and swept forward to the culminating scene, where the two lads step out from the rocks with drum and fife, 'and the old tune of the old Line shrills and rattles.' Then from the purely descriptive writing which follows, take a specimen like this: 'The English were not running. They were hacking and hewing and stabbing The Fore and Aft held their fire till one bullet could drive through five or six men, and the front of the Afghan force gave on the volley. They then selected their men, and slew them with deep gasps and short hacking coughs, and groanings of leather belts against strained bodies.' Scarcely less fine is the charge of the Lancers, which 'detached the enemy from his base as a sponge is torn from a rock, and left him ringed about with fire in that pitiless plain. And as a sponge is chased round the bath-tub by the hand of the bather, so were the Afghans chased.' Whenever Mr. Kipling touches on a battle-scene, especially a mêlée, he writes with this absolute mastery of it all. It is real pictorial magic. The charge of Arabs on the square on the Nile bank (The Light that Failed, chap, ii.) is too long for full quotation here, and too good to be mutilated; but the following may be taken as a sample of the way in which he can render a personal incident in such surroundings. It is from a tale in