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Soldiers Three - Part 2 by Rudyard Kipling
page 132 of 246 (53%)
the field at ten minutes' notice; they are always half in and half
out of a difficulty somewhere along the monotonous line; their
lives are as hard as their own muscles, and the papers never say
anything about them. It was from this force that the Government
picked its men.

One night, at a station where the mounted Night Patrol fire as
they challenge, and the wheat rolls in great blue-green waves
under our cold northern moon, the officers were playing billiards
in the mud-walled club-house, when orders came to them that they
were to go on parade at once for a night-drill. They grumbled, and
went to turn out their men - a hundred English troops, let us say,
two hundred Goorkhas, and about a hundred cavalry of the finest
native cavalry in the world.

When they were on the parade-ground, it was explained to them in
whispers that they must set off at once across the hills to
Bersund. The English troops were to post themselves round the
hills at the side of the valley; the Goorkhas would command the
gorge and the death-trap, and the cavalry would fetch a long march
round and get to the back of the circle of hills, whence, if there
were any difficulty, they could charge down on the Mullah's men.
But orders were very strict that there should be no fighting and
no noise. They were to return in the morning with every round of
ammunition intact, and the Mullah and the thirteen outlaws bound
in their midst. If they were successful, no one would know or care
anything about their work; but failure meant probably a small
border war, in which the Gulla Kutta Mullah would pose as a
popular leader against a big bullying power, instead of a common
Border murderer.
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