The fog had lifted by this time, lifted for steady rain; so the English troops coming up found the foes more easily than the battalion had done. But the foes were dead. Those random shots, those reckless charges from nothingness to nothingness had done some work.
And part of it was on the naked body of a Jain ascetic, with a bit of muslin swathed about his mouth, lest, inadvertently, he should bring death to the smallest of God's creatures.
[GOLD, FRANKINCENSE, AND MYRRH]
"Oh! Mummy," said the Boy, as his mother slipped a sort of nightgown over his trim little khaki uniform, "I think it'sh shkittles!"
Boy's invariable dissent--picked up about the barracks of an Indian cantonment--was applied in this instance both to the angelic robe represented by the nightgown, and the angelic part the child was to play in it.
For it was Christmas Eve, and the vague desire for peace and goodwill which, even in these latter days, comes with Christmas-tide, had made the English aliens in the station devise a Tree for those still greater aliens--the Boer prisoners--who lived among them in the strange spider's web of barbed wire, which to the casual eye seemed so inefficient a prison for enemies who had defied capture so long, so bravely.
It was Boy's mother who had started the idea. She was one of those women, lovable utterly, not always reasonable, who find solace in dramatising their own sorrows. So when, two years before, her husband, commanding a native cavalry regiment still quartered in the station, had been ordered to Africa on Staff duty, she had remained on in the big house, sharing it with a friend, and continuing religiously to care for all things for which her absent soldier had cared--even for the regiment which was still so proud of its Colonel at the front.
It was a heartrending solace, indeed, to see the native officers and men, when they inquired for the latest news, salute Boy as solemnly as they would have saluted his father; and it pleased her to perceive that the only regard these warriors had for her was as guardian of their Sahib's honour and of his only son; for the wellbeing of which things they were fiercely jealous.
To this woman, militant to the heart's core yet sentimentally pitiful, it had seemed appropriate that Boy--son of the only fighting father in the station--should play the part of the "Christ-kind," the Bringer of good gifts at the Christmas-tree. There was no geographical or ethnological reason why this German custom should obtain among the Boers, but Boy's mother had recollections of school-days abroad, and thought that her little son, with his aureole of red hair and grave baby face, so like the absent hero, would look sweet in the part.
"It isn't skittles at all, Boy," she said softly. "Remember what I told you about loving your enemies."