pal,--"Done, colour-sergeant! Nonsense, man! Why, you'll be back to duty
in a fortnight." And the answer was another choked groan.

Hour by hour--would day never break? Not yet; it was just twenty minutes
to ten--man by man they brought them down. The tent was carpeted now
with limp bodies. With breaking backs they heaved some shoulder-high
into waggons; others they laid on mattresses on the ground. In the
rain-blurred light of the lantern--could it not cease, that piercing
drizzle to-night of all nights at least? The doctor, the one doctor,
toiled buoyantly on. Cutting up their clothes with scissors, feeling
with light firm fingers over torn chest or thigh, cunningly slipping
round the bandage, tenderly covering up the crimson ruin of strong
men--hour by hour, man by man, he toiled on.

And mark--and remember for the rest of your lives--that Tommy Atkins
made no distinction between the wounded enemy and his dearest friend. To
the men who in the afternoon were lying down behind rocks with rifles
pointed to kill him, who had shot, may be, the comrade of his heart, he
gave the last drop of his water, the last drop of his melting strength,
the last drop of comfort he could wring out of his seared, gallant
soul. In war, they say,--and it is true,--men grow callous: an afternoon
of shooting and the loss of your brother hurts you less than a week
before did a thorn in your dog's foot. But it is only compassion for the
dead that dries up; and as it dries, the spring wells up among good men
of sympathy with all the living. A few men had made a fire in the
gnawing damp and cold, and round it they sat, even the unwounded Boer
prisoners. For themselves they took the outer ring, and not a word did
any man say that could mortify the wound of defeat. In the afternoon
Tommy was a hero, in the evening he was a gentleman.