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way of holding his head that said, “I’m cock of the walk.” The Biographer never felt like that. He wished he had his big camera by him; with its armour in front of him—its huge elm-wood box, glass plate and hood—he felt protected, in control, unassailable.
    He looked across the table again at Churchill, who had begun to hold forth about Boer armaments. He had the slightest wisp of ginger moustache and, also slight, a lisp which distorted his pronunciation of the letter Y. Yet in spite of this impediment, and of his aristocrat’s arrogance, he had something about him. His remarks displayed the kind of interest and depth that was absent from the other talk round the table.
    On the way into supper, for instance, he had whispered conspiratorially to the Biographer—“Isn’t it odious, a voyage? The sea’s heavy silence all around; you keep expecting something to leap up out of the water. But it never does.”
    There was nothing to it, really. It was just an odd, slightly elaborate fragment of conversation; but still, fools didn’t make observations like that. The Pole-Carews and Gerards simply didn’t talk in that way. Atkins, perhaps, but not the officers. Buller, though, he was something else: full of the wisdom and caution born of years of campaigning. But an air of worry hung about him tonight as they tucked into crown of lamb. The jollity he had shown on deck had quite disappeared, and he kept looking up crossly whenever one of the gathering made an inflammatory remark.
    “Listen here,” he finally growled. “I don’t like dinner becoming a political discussion. We are on our way to do a difficult job. It is important for us to resist the prejudices and antipathies of religion and race if we are to have a clear view of the military task.”
    One consequence of Buller’s statement was that a substantial portion of the rest of the dinner was spent discussing Scintillant’s recent by-a-neck victory over Ercildoune in the Cesarewitch at Newmarket. This, oddly enough, had taken place at almost exactly the time Kruger’s ultimatum had expired. Many of the diners seemed to have been at the course, and one had landed a hefty wager. The Biographer smiled to himself. He had watched a different kind of sport that week—Villa tackling Spurs, in the first round of the Cup. Now he lifted to his lips another cup, a porcelain one full of coffee, and glanced across the table into the penetrating eyes of Winston Spencer Churchill. No, these weren’t his people. They even drank coffee differently, holding up the saucer daintily as they sipped.

Four
    T he coffee bushes were in blossom with little white flowers. Muhle Maseku noticed these, and thereupon chided himself. For this was not the time for beauty. He heard the crack of the long whip behind him, driving one of the bullock carts upon which the ill and infirm were piled, and all around the murmuring tramp of seven thousand men and their families. Seven thousand! They had been mineworkers on the Rand, most of them, out of Natal, and with rumours of war they had lost their jobs. At the back was the white man, Marwick, tending the sick, at the front the concertinas, mouth organs and drums of the mine band.
    The tunes were painfully jaunty, for such a miserable time. Otherwise, all was solemn calm. Muhle himself was worried about his wife, Nandi, and their young son Wellington. They were marching alongside Marwick’s bullock carts at the back, with the other women and children. Muhle was worried that his own family or he himself would become sick soon. His feet were a mess of blisters from the walking, and what little food they had been able to bring with them was exhausted. He turned against the flow—thirty abreast, in some places—and went back to the women’s group. Looking through the crowd, where the heads of babies peeked out from between the shoulder-blades of their mothers, riding in knapsacks made of folded cloth, he could see neither Nandi nor