24 
LAND & WATER 
'XoxcniixT 9, i<)i6 
(Co-i.'.'HicJ /roin (-aije 22) 
poor devil. I had no ill-will left for him, though coming down 
that hill I was rather hoping that the two of us might have a 
final scrap. He was a brute and a bully, but, by God ! 
he was a man. I heard his great roar when he saw the tumult, 
and the ne.vt I saw was his monstrous figure working at the 
,L,'un. He swung it south and turned it on the fugitives. 
But he never fired it. The press was on him, and the gun 
was swept sideways. He stood up, a foot his;hcr than any ot 
them, and he seemed to be trying to check th • rush with his 
pistol. There is power in numbers, even tliough every unit 
is biKjken and fleeing. I-'or a second, to that wild crow 1 
.Stumm was the enemy, and they had strength enough to 
crush him. The wave flowed round and then across him. 
1 saw the butt-ends of rifles crash on his head and shoulders. 
and the next second the stream had passed over his body. 
That was God's judgment on the inan wiio had set himself 
.ibove his kind. • 
Sandy grippxl my shoulder and was shouting in my ear : 
" They're coming. Dick. Look at the grey devils ! . . 
Oh, God be thanked it's our friends ! 
The ne.xt minute we were tumbling down the hillside, 
P>lenkiron hopping on one leg between us. I heard diml\ 
Sandy crying, " Oh, well done our side ! " and Blenkiroii 
declaiming about Harper's Ferry, but I had no voice at all 
and no wish to shout. I know that tears were in my eyes, 
and that if 1 had bvtn left alone 1 would have sat down and 
cried with pure thani^iulness. For sweeping down the glen 
came a cloud of grey cavalry on little wiry horses, a cloud 
wliich stayed not for the rear of the fugitives, but swept 0:1 
lik' a flight of rainbows, with the steel of their lancc-heads 
glittering in the v.'inter sun. They were riding for Erzerum 
Remember that for three months we had been with ti e 
enemy and had never seen the face of an Ally in arms. \\ f 
had been cut off from the fellowship of a great cause, like a 
fort surrounded by an army. .\nd now we were delivered, 
and there fell around us the waiiii joy of comradeship as w( 11 
as the exultation ot victory. 
W'e flung caution to the winds and went stark mad. Sand\ , 
still in his emerald coat, was scrambling up the farther sloj) ■ 
<<f the hollow, yelling greetings in every language known ti 
man. The leader saw him, with a word checked his men, 
and for a moment — it was marvellous to see the horsts 
reined in in such a break-neck ride — and from the squadrcn 
half a dozen troof)ers swung loose and wheeled towards us. 
Then a man in a grey overcoat and a sheepskin cap was on 
the ground beside us wringing our hands. 
Vou are safe, my old friends," it was Peter's voice tl a 
spoke — " I will take you back to our army, and get ycu 
breakfast." 
" No, by the Lord, you won't," cried Sandy, " We've 
had the rough end of the job and now we'll have the fun. 
Look after Hlenkiron and these fellows 9! mine. I'm goin;,' 
to ride knee by knee with your siwrtsmen for the city." 
Peter sjwke a word, and two of the Cossacks dismounted. 
The ne.\t 1 knew 1 was mixed up in the cloud of greycoats. 
;,'alloping down the road up which the morning before \vc 
had strained to the castrol. 
That was the great hour of my life, and to live through it 
was worth a dozen years of slavery. With a broken left arm 
1 had little hold on my beast, so I tiusted my neck to him 
and let him have his will. Black with dirt and smoke, hatless. 
with no kind of uniform, 1 was a wilder figure than an\- 
Cossack. 1 soon was separated from Sandy, who had two 
hands and a better horse, and seemed resolute to press for- 
ward to the very van. That would have been suicide for nv, 
and 1 had all I could do to keep my place in the bunch I 
rode with. 
But, great God ! what an hour it was ' There was Iohm- 
shooting on our flank, but nothing to trouble us, though the 
gun team of some Austrian howitzer, struggling madly at a 
bridge gave us a bit of a tussle. Everything flitted past me 
like smcjke, or like the mad finale of a dream just before wak- 
ing. I knew the living movement under me, and the ccm 
panionship of men, but all dimly, for at heart I was alcne, 
grappling with the realisation of a new world. I felt the 
shadows of the Palantuken glen fading, and the great burst of 
light as we emerged on the wider valley. Somewhere before 
me was ii pall of smoke seamed with red flames, and beyond 
the darkness of still higher hills. All that time 1 was dream- 
ing, crooning daft catches of song to myself, so happy, so 
.deliriously happy that 1 dared not try to think. 1 kept mutter- 
ing to my.selt a kind of prayer made up of Bil)le words to Him 
wiio had shown me His goodness in the land of the living. 
But as we drew out from the skirts of the hills and began the 
long slope to the city, I woke to clear consciousness. I felt 
the smell of sheepskin and lathered horses, and above all the 
bitter smell of fire. Down in the trougii lay Erzerum, now 
burning in many places, and from the east, past Ih*'. silent 
lorts, horsemen wtie closing in on it. 1 yelled to my com- 
rades that we were ni^-arest, that we would be first in the city, 
and they nodded happily and shouted their strange war-cries. 
As we topped the last ridge 1 saw below ms the van of our 
charge — a dark mass on ttie snow — while the broken enemy 
on both sides were flinging away their arms and scittering 
in the fields. 
In the very front, now nearing the city ramparts, was one 
man. He was like the point of the steel spear soon to be driven 
home. In the clenr morning air I could see that he did not 
wear the uniform of the invaders. He was bareheaded and 
rode like one possessed, and against the snow 1 cau lit the 
dark sheen of emerald. As he rode it seemed that the fleeing 
Turks were stricken still, and sank by the roadside with eye^ 
strained after his unheeding figure. . . . 
Then 1 knew that the prophecy had been true, and that 
their prophet had not failed them. The long-looked for 
revelation had come. Greenmantle had appeared at last 
to an aw.iiting people. 
The End. 
Unwise Hero-Worship 
LORD WILLIA.M HEK'ESFORD was a member 
of an exceedingly popular family. That so often 
much abused jihrase. " a good fellow " was applicable 
U) him in its best sense. When he passed away 
sixteen years ago, there were hundreds who would ha\'e 
hailed with pleasure a brief biography relating many of the 
good stories that clung to his name, telling of his wonderful 
feats of physical activity and endurance, and a few of the 
many kindly deeds which he did, and which still keep 
his memory bright. But this biography {Lord William 
Bercsford, V.C. Some Memories, by Mrs. Stuart Menzies, 
Herbert Jenkins, 12s. 6d.), is just what a biography should 
not be. Anecdotes are few and far apart and often sp.iilt 
in the telling for c.xample. tlit> making ot a feeble jest on Lord 
William's rough and ready remark to the brave man whom 
he saved under fire at Ulundi, and for which he received 
the V.C. Old scandals arc resurrected which ought to have 
been left in their graves, and the authoress fails to realise 
that there is no worse form of accusation than a vague excuse 
often repeated, for an offence tliat is not even defined. 
Lord Willitim Beresford made two great mistakes ; he did 
not resign the Military Secretaryship to the Governor-General 
of InditL in 1S84, when Lord Ripon retired, and secondly, 
he stopped on after the Dufferins left. His last ten years in 
India did not add to his own reputation or to the reputation 
of Anglo-India. Mrs. Stuart Men/.ies quotes the following 
saving of Sir George Chesney whom Lord \^'il!ialn passed on 
horseback one day at Simla : " There goes a leader of men. 
Instead of being Mihtary Secretary to the Viceroy he ought 
to be commanding a cavalry brigade ; he would be un- 
equalled at that work, always supposing he was not turned 
out of the service for disobedience to orders." This is the 
plain truth. Once lie had got the Military Secretaryship 
into first-class working order, he should have moved on. As 
it was, he suffered from his own virtues. A born organ s.'r, 
who did the right thing and never forgot a detail, more through 
instinct than intellect, an excellent disciphnarian who ^t?t 
made his subordinates love to work for him, he so perfected 
the machinery of his dehcate and onerous ofTirc that he found 
himself with much too much spare time on his hands. The 
Simla of Mrs. Hauksbee was the Simla of Bill Beresford ; how 
far he made it what it was one cannot say, but the strength of 
his personality in social matters may be judged by the fact 
that he maintained the same social atmosphere under the 
austere and somewhat forbidding countenances of the l-Jipons 
which had lieen generated in the gay and unconventional reign 
of that i)icturesque being Lord l.ytton, whom his enemies 
in Anglo-India used to describe as having " the api)earance 
and manners of an Italian organ-grinder and the morals ot 
his monkey." 
What were the rights and wrongs of those old racing 
scandals which at one time were almost chronic at every 
big meeting who can say after all these years, but Mrs. Stuart 
Menzies should have realised that at least it did not redound 
to her hero's credit that the Military Secretary of the Viceroy 
should always be somewhere about the centre of each one of 
them. Let us conclude with this tribute which might have 
been spoken by Mrs. Hauksbee ; it is both true and witty : 
Another friend, a clever lady of tliat time at Simla speaking of 
Lord William's character generally, said : " It is not Bill's clever- 
ness or quickiicss to grasp the situation, but what he has got in an 
cpiinent degree is what Solomon had. I have always thought that 
Solomon's great wisdom was much exaggerated, and that what he 
really had in pie emini;nce. and Bill has too, is tact, doing tlie 
right thing at the right time. For instance ... it was not 
Solomon's great knowledge- that bainboo/led the Queen of Sheba, 
bul knowing when she wanted a loot-sloe/1 1" 
