He had tested those advantages time and time again. The
very memories they raised were a rebuke to weakness and hesitation. If
he ever had duties he was inclined to shirk, he thought of that
half-hour which had forever set the seal upon his reputation as a
British soldier.
He thought of it now. He saw himself again looking up at the bristling
cliffs that were to be rushed, whence the Afridis were pouring their
deadly fire. He saw himself measuring with his eye the saddle of
precipitous slope that had to be crossed, devoid of cover and strewn
with the bodies of dead Ghurkas. Of the actual crossing, with sixty
Rangers behind him, he had little or no recollection. He had passed
under the hail of bullets as through perils in a dream. As in a dream,
too, he remembered seeing his men, when he turned to cheer them on, go
down like nine-pins--throwing up their arms and staggering, or twisting
themselves up like convulsive cats. It was grotesque rather than
horrible; he felt himself grinning inwardly, as at something hellishly
comic, when he reached the group of Ghurkas huddled under the cavernous
shelter of the cliff. Then, just as he threw himself on the ground,
panting like a spent dog and feeling his body all over to know whether
or not he had been wounded, he saw poor Private Vickerson out in the
open, thirty yards from the protection of the wall of rock.
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