Book Four—Chapter Seven.
The Fight on the Hill—Reunion—“The Greatest King in all the world”—Home Again.
This is a busy, work-a-day world, events will not tarry, nor will duty wait even upon grief, and no sooner had Harry and his party dug a grave and laid poor Somali Jack to his long rest in a cotton-tree grove, than he had to hurry off to camp again.
It was the morning of another day, a bright and beautiful day, birds sang in the bush, or went flitting from branch to branch, displaying their rainbow colours, as happy and careless as if there were no sorrow in the world.
But other birds there were—kites and fierce-looking corvidae, with horrid-looking vultures, that went sailing lazily round in the sky, alighting every moment on some dead body—to gorge. And gorge they would, until unable either to walk, or fly.
And what they leave of the corpses on the battlefield the ants, whose great hills and homes can be counted by the score, will speedily devour.
At night, too, when the vultures have gone to roost on the scorched and blackened branches of the burned forest, wild dogs and hyaenas will come in crowds to the awful feast.
Then rains and dews will fall and wash the bones, and the sun’s bright beams will bleach them, till in time nought will be left in the field of that fearful fight except blanched skulls and snow-white skeletons.
Ah, boys! where is the glory of war when the fight is fought, when the battle is over, and the victory won? Look upon that silent, bone-strewn plain and tell me where.