Isolated sharpshooters maintained a dropping fire.
The company whose operations I watched,--Lieutenant Lockhart's,--killed
one of these with a volley, and we found him sitting by a little pool,
propped against a stone. He had been an ugly man originally, but now
that the bones of his jaw and face were broken in pieces by the bullet,
he was hideous to look upon. His only garment was a ragged blue linen
cloak fastened at the waist. There he sat--a typical tribesman,
ignorant, degraded, and squalid, yet brave and warlike; his only
property, his weapon, and that his countrymen had carried off. I could
not help contrasting his intrinsic value as a social organism, with that
of the officers who had been killed during the week, and those lines of
Kipling which appear at the beginning of this chapter were recalled to
mind with a strange significance. Indeed I often heard them quoted in
the Watelai Valley.
The sappers had now entered the village, and were engaged in preparing
the hovels of which it consisted for destruction.
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