Page:Wee Willie Winkie, and other stories (1890).djvu/86

80 his fellows in Pushtoo. "They send children against us. What a people, and what fools!"

"Hya!" said Jakin, nodding his head cheerily. "You go down-country. Food get, water get—live like a bloomin' Raja. That's better than baynit get-it in your innards. Good bye, ole man. Take care o' your beautiful figure-'ed, an' try to look content-like."

The men laughed and fell in for their first march when they began to realise that a soldier's life was not all beer and skittles. They were much impressed with the size and bestial ferocity of the niggers, whom they had now learned to call "Paythans," and more with the exceeding discomfort of their own surroundings. Twenty old soldiers in the corps would have taught them how to make themselves moderately snug at night, but they had no old soldiers, and, as the troops on the line of march said, they lived like pigs. They learned the heart-breaking cussedness of camp-kitchens and camels and the depravity of a tent and a wither-wrung mule. They studied animalculæ in water, and developed a few cases of dysentery in their study.

At the end of their third march they were disagreeably surprised by the arrival in their camp of a hammered iron slug, which, fired from a steady rest at seven hundred yards, flicked out the brains of a private seated by the fire. This robbed them of their peace for a night, and was the beginning of a long-range fire carefully calculated to that end. In the day time they saw nothing except an occasional puff of smoke from a crag above the line of march. At night there were distant spurts of flame, and occasional casualties, which set the whole camp blazing into the gloom, and, occasionally, into opposite tents. Then they swore vehemently, and vowed that this was magnificent, but not war.

Indeed it was not. The regiment could not halt for reprisals against the skirmishers of the country side. Its duty was to go forward and make connection with the Scotch and Gurkha troops with which it was brigaded. The Afghans knew this, and knew, too, after their first trial shots, that