Three and four times the bugles shrieked the order, and when it
was obeyed the Fore and Aft looked that their foe should be lying
before them in mown swaths of men. A light wind drove the smoke to
leeward, and showed the enemy still in position and apparently
unaffected. A quarter of a ton of lead had been buried a furlong
in front of them, as the ragged earth attested.

That was not demoralizing to the Afghans, who have not European
nerves. They were waiting for the mad riot to die down, and were
firing quietly into the heart of the smoke. A private of the Fore
and Aft spun up his company shrieking with agony, another was
kicking the earth and gasping, and a third, ripped through the
lower intestines by a jagged bullet, was calling aloud on his
comrades to put him out of his pain. These were the casualties,
and they were not soothing to hear or see. The smoke cleared to a
dull haze.

Then the foe began to shout with a great shouting, and a mass - a
black mass - detached itself from the main body, and rolled over
the ground at horrid speed. It was composed of, perhaps, three
hundred men, who would shout and fire and slash if the rush of
their fifty comrades who were determined to die carried home. The
fifty were Ghazis, half maddened with drugs and wholly mad with
religious fanaticism. When they rushed the British fire ceased,
and in the lull the order was given to close ranks and meet them
with the bayonet.

Any one who knew the business could have told the Fore and Aft
that the only way of dealing with a Ghazi rush is by volleys at