class="caption">A SPANISH SENTRY

There is still another protection to the North Front. It is only the protection which a watch-dog gives at night; but a watch-dog is most important. He gives you time to sound your burglar-alarm and to get a pistol from under your pillow. A line of sentries pace the Neutral Ground, and have paced it for nearly two hundred years. Their sentry-boxes dot the half-mile of turf, and their red coats move backward and forward night and day, and any one who leaves the straight and narrow road crossing the Neutral Ground, and who comes too near, passes a dead-line and is shot. Facing them, a half-mile off, are the white adobe sentry-boxes of Spain and another row of sentries, wearing long blue coats and queer little shakos, and smoking cigarettes. And so the two great powers watch each other unceasingly across the half-mile of turf, and say, "So far shall you go, and no farther; this belongs to me." There is nothing more significant than these two rows of sentries; you notice it whenever you cross the Neutral Ground for a ride in Spain. First you see the English sentry, rather short and very young, but very clean and rigid, and scowling fiercely over the chin strap of his big white helmet. His shoulder-straps shine with pipe-clay and his boots with blacking, and his arms are burnished and oily. Taken alone, he is a little atom, a molecule; but he is complete in himself, with his food and lodging on his back, and his arms ready to his hand. He is one of a great system that obtains from India to Nova Scotia, and from Bermuda to Africa and Australia; and he shows that he knows this in the way in which he holds up his chin and kicks out his legs as he tramps back and forward guarding the big rock at his back. And facing him, half a mile away, you will see a tall handsome man seated on a stone, with the tails of his long coat wrapped warmly around his legs, and with his gun leaning against another rock while he rolls a cigarette; and then, with his hands in his pockets, he gazes through the smoke at the sky above and the sea on either side, and wonders when he will be paid his peseta a day for fighting and bleeding for his country. This helps to make you understand how six thousand half-starved Englishmen held Gibraltar for four years against the army of Spain.

This is about all that you can see of Gibraltar as a fortress. You hear, of course, of much more, and you can guess at a great deal. Up above, where the Signal Station is, and where no one, not even an officer in uniform not engaged on the works, is allowed to go, are the real fortifications. What looks like a rock is a monster gun painted gray, or a tree hides the mouth of another. And in this forbidden territory are great cannon which are worked from the lowest ramparts. These are the present triumphs of Gibraltar. Before they came, the clouds which shut out the sight of the Rock as well as the rest of the world from its summit rendered the great pieces of artillery there as useless in bad weather as they are harmless in times of peace. The very elements threatened to war against the English, and a shower of rain or a veering wind might have altered the fortunes of a battle. But a clever man named Watkins has invented a position-finder, by means of which those on the lowest ramparts, well out of the clouds, can aim the great guns on the summit at a vessel unseen by the gunners lost in the mist above, and by electricity fire a shot from a gun a half-mile above them so that it will strike an object many miles off at sea. It will be a very strange sensation to the captain of such a vessel when he finds her bombarded by shells that belch forth from a drifting cloud.

No stranger has really any idea of the real strength of this fortress, or in what part of it its real strength lies. Not one out of ten of its officers knows it. Gibraltar is a grand and grim practical joke; it is an armed foe like the army in Macbeth, who came in the semblance of a wood, or like the wooden horse of Troy that held the pick of the enemy's fighting-men. What looks like a solid face of rock is a hanging curtain that masks a battery; the blue waters of the bay are treacherous with torpedoes; and every little smiling village of Spain has been marked down for destruction, and has had its measurements taken as accurately as though the English batteries had been playing on it already for many years. The Rock is undermined and tunnelled throughout, and food and provisions are stored away in it to last a siege of seven years. Telephones and telegraphs, signal stations for flagging, search-lights, and other such devilish inventions, have been planted on every point, and only the Governor himself knows what other modern improvements have been introduced into the bowels of this mountain or distributed behind bits of landscape gardening on its surface.

On the 25th of February, at half-past ten in the morning, three guns were fired in rapid succession from the top of the Rock, and the windows shook. Three guns mean that Gibraltar is about to be attacked by a fleet of war-ships, and that "England expects every man to do his duty." So I went out to see him do it. Men were running through the streets trailing their guns, and officers were galloping about pulling at their gloves, and bodies of troops were swinging along at a double-quick, which always makes them look as though they were walking in tight boots, and bugles were calling, and groups of men, black and clearly cut against the sky, were excitedly switching the air with flags from every jutting rock and every rampart of the garrison.