welcome us half-way, were also carried along when the bridge broke up. After that it was a case of sauve qui peut for all of us, and I’m sorry to say that only about a third of the force I started out with has, so far, straggled back to Kurna.”

V

I was still chuckling over F——’s account of his experience with the bees when, opening the latest issue of the Sphere the following afternoon, I saw his familiar face smiling back at me from the corner of one of the first pages. “Been getting mentioned in dispatches,” I said to myself; and then the title of the page, on which appeared a score of other portraits, met my eye: “Dead on the Field of Honour; Officers Killed in Action.” There were no particulars, not even a date; nor was anything further to be learned behind the tape-bound portals of Whitehall. To the officers of F——’s regiment, now fighting in Flanders, some few details were ultimately vouchsafed; and from one of these, whom I encountered a few days ago, during his leave in London, I learned all that I have so far been able to gather concerning the death of my friend.

“F——’s work in cutting the bridge of boats across the Tigris,” he said, “is spoken of as one of the most daring things of the Mesopotamian campaign. Undoubtedly he deserved a V.C. for it, and it is just possible one may be awarded posthumously. He was slightly wounded there, but must have been out on duty again within a very few days. According to the account we have received, he was off on some special detail when he came upon a number of imbeciles of the transport trying to ferry several camels and machine-guns across a back channel of the Euphrates on a kalek, a sort of raft consisting of a light platform resting on inflated sheepskins. One of the camels had kicked a hole in the platform and was rapidly demolishing the supporting skins, when F——, fearing the loss of the guns, swam off to try and set things right. In endeavouring to extricate the camel, he ducked under the kalek, where, it seems likely, his wounded head was struck by one of the brute’s sharp hoofs, and he let go his grip and sank before any one could get hold of him. Glorious death, wasn’t it,—for a man who had led the life F—— had, and who, for that particular region, was the most nearly indispensable man with the expedition?”

Two months have gone by since F——’s last letter was written, and the Mesopotamian campaign has been prosecuted along the general lines he forecasted at the outset. Nasire and Amara have fallen, and the early winter will see the armies drawn up for the final fight for Bagdad, probably upon that same Plain of Shinar where the scarlet desert flowers still keep alive the old belief that

For destiny has decreed that once more the might of two rival races shall lock in death-grips for the possession of that age-old prize, the Garden of Eden. Eve was put without the gates when she tasted of the Forbidden Fruit, and right on down through the ages the same undeviating penalty has been inflicted upon the Babylonian, Mede, Assyrian, and other empires that gorged themselves upon the Forbidden Fruit of Corruption. Brave foeman that he is, the Turk, cloyed with the same Forbidden Fruit, has long been marked for the inexorable justice of the ages, and every precedent of tradition, history, and strategy points to the conclusion that the closing hour of his stewardship of the Garden of Eden is about to strike.

“IT’S A WAY THEY HAVE IN THE AIR CORPS”

I

It had been all of nine years since I first met Horne at an estancia house-party in the heart of the Argentine Pampas, and fully seven since I last saw him at a banquet given at the Buenos Aires Jockey Club in his honour, a day or two after he had led his four to victory in the finals of the River Plate polo championships. Yet, in spite of the pallor of a face I had always remembered as bronzed, and a slight hitch in his once swinging gait, I recognised him instantly—it was the keen, piercing glance, I think, and the sudden flash of white teeth in the quick smile—when he hailed me from a passing taxi and came hobbling back along the broad pavement of Whitehall to meet me.

“What does this mean?” I asked, indicating his jaunty Flying Corps uniform, after we had shaken hands. “I thought it was the army you were in before you resigned to become an opulent estanciero and ‘man-about-the-Pampas.’”

“It was the army I came back to,” he replied, “and I was with my old regiment at Neuve Chapelle when a fragment of hand-grenade effected a semi-solution of the continuity of one of my Achilles tendons and put a period on my further usefulness in that branch of the service. The ‘air’ was still open to me, however, and, as I had already dabbled in flying,—I was the first man to pilot an aeroplane across the Plate estuary,—I got a commission almost immediately, and so lost very little time.”

“But your ‘lily-white’ face and hands,” I pressed. “I never heard that the air had a bleaching effect on the complexion.”

“Oh—that—” (Horne looked absently at a blue-veined hand and shuffled uneasily), “that must have come from my spell of ‘C.H.’—confined in hospital. Got knocked up a bit again. Flying over Belgium. Got shot down and hit the edge of Holland a trifle too hard when I volplaned over the boundary. Telescoped a few vertebræ, that’s all. Now, be a good chap and stop asking questions and jump in with me and come along to the Club.”

Horne waited for me while I picked up a few promised figures at the “Lloyd-Georgery,” as he facetiously called the new Ministry of Munitions in Whitehall Gardens, and then took me up to one of the Service clubs in Piccadilly. There, without giving me further chance to “get him up into the air,” he launched at once into news and reminiscence of the Plate and the Pampas. When I left him at six, we had talked for close on two hours without more than the most casual reference to events of the war.

“A keen patriot, like all the rest of these young Britons who have flocked home from overseas to fight for their country,” I reflected as I sauntered down through Green Park; “but certainly not keen on his work.” I even speculated as to whether or not Horne might be in some sort of trouble in the service. Nothing else seemed to account for the man’s reticence regarding everything connected with his special activities.

A few days later Horne called me up to ask me to dine with him that evening at a famous old restaurant in the Strand.

“‘S——’s’ is a bit more ‘merry and bright’ than this old tomb of a Club,” he said, “and a few of the Flying Corps chaps who are in the habit of rendezvousing there while in London on leave you’ll find well worth knowing.”

The gathering was even more informal than I had anticipated. One of the long tables, it appeared, was set aside for “R.F.C.” officers and their friends, and these dropped in by twos and threes, as suited their convenience, all the way from seven to ten o’clock.

There were half-a-dozen men at the table when Horne and I entered, and all of these—they had stalls for a new “revue”—presently took their