whenever the sniping permitted; but it was not till dark that he made any real progress, situated as he was on a bare skyline sniped at short range from good cover.

As already mentioned, the hill was a stepped one, and for Birmingham's picquet to be holdable it was essential that the high ground forward should be held. Judge, then, of our dismay at seeing a party of sappers-come up to assist in wiring the Gurkhas' and our picquets-sending down their mules, which with such labour had been dragged up part of the way. They said that the Gurkhas were going to withdraw and not put a picquet on the knoll.

So I went forward up on to the peak, 150 yards in front of which the 2/76th were lying, and had speech with the officer in charge of the Gurkhas, No; he had no intention of withdrawing, but as for building a picquet, doubtless such a thing might be possible after dark, but at present it was hard enough work merely to live on the ridge. And as though to emphasise his words, renewed gusts of lead beat and slashed about the knoll whereon we crouched.

Apparently the sappers had merely been sent off out of the way, since no man could stand up beyond the knoll, and therefore wiring was out of the question.

the appearance of picquetbuilding activity having galvanised the enemy into greater expenditure of lead, and their bullets whickered past continually like angry bees.

"Struggle" is a good word to describe our progress about Flathead that day, for in places it was exceeding steep, and how the laden men get over it, cumbered as they were with boxes of bombs and S.A.A., ooils of wire and picks and shovels, high Heaven only knows.

The Pioneers' paths run true and smooth from end to end nowadays, hewn out of the rock, but even so I have seen the globe-trotters cling tremulously in places to the rocks, turning their gaze inward lest they grow giddy and fall.

Yet on the 14th, in most cases, we kept our foothold somehow or other, and orept along the shaly rooks, though later in the afternoon we chanced it more frequently, and scurried along the flatter crest to the accompaniment of hissing bullets. One felt that one would risk anything, any number of snipers, rather than face again those heart-breaking clamberings along the rocks under the skyline.

Later I visited the knoll again to ensure that it was held, and found things still the same: the same groups of men flattened in the rocks about the edge holding off the enemy on the right, the same spatter of lead, and down a long green shale - slide, just below us, wounded men of the 2/76th being got away.

Duke's Nose picquet was finished first-not much to look at, but a real wall of stone, and, wondrous to relate, a thin belt of wire, quite the finest thing in picquets at Asa Khan that day. Jacob was putting half his men at the base of the topmost pinnacle, while the rest lay on the flat top of the pinnacle itself, whence you could drop a stone 500 feet sheer into the riverbed. A giddy place indeed, the giddier for the bullets which smacked now and again upon the rocks, though not in large numbers, for Duke's Nose was a comparatively quiet corner that noisy day.

I descended the steep hillside to the river, and making my way through the streams

They told me not to draw on Shortleigh's company, still lying across the Asa Khan nullah, evidently for a last line of defence, but to get men from Battalion H.Q., who would be found on the plateau above between the Sarwek and Asa Khan nullahs.

Thither I went through a mixed mass of mules and men and guns in action, and rows of wounded, up the bank whence I had seen C and D Companies start off four hours earlier. At the top was 8 little dip where, sheltering from the incessant bullets that, whimpering past like flights of insects, enfiladed the line from Dazzle Hill flank, Battalion H.Q. was resting.

In a few disjointed phrases they told me the bald outlines of their adventures. It had been again a forlorn hope, the objective too far off, the foroe too small. But it was all there was to spare at the moment, and something had had to be done to render it possible for the pioneers to get the right-bank perimeter into some scratchy form of defensibility ere nightfall.

Alas! the lack of accurate maps helped again to weight the soales. Between Asa Khan and the towering sugar-loaf

mass of Dazzle Hill, 1800 yards, lie two nullahs, the second great wide cliffbanked ravine, deep as the main river channel.

Men dropped continually as the Konkanis pushed on, the Punjabi company in second line. They cleared the first nullah, down into the second and up to the foot of Dazzle Hill, where a crescent-shaped outcrop of chocolate-hued rock breaks the swelling roundness of the slope.

Then, just as the leading men, pushing up the steep hillside, reached the chocolate rocks, the concealed enemy swarmed out upon them and with bullet and knife forced them down the slope, scattering the hillside with dead and wounded, who, needless to say, died later. The Babe took it first through the arm, and then mercifully through the chest, dropping stone-dead as two of his men tried to haul him away, dropping themselves an instant later.

As the broken remnants of his leading platoons recoiled down the slope, Hodkin evidently tried to break off the fight and get the rest of his people back up the near bank of the nullah to where the supporting Punjabi company lay. But the enemy had massed also in the nullah to his right, unseen of gun and supporting infantry, and as their friends swept out of the chocolate rooks at the foot of the hill, they came in with a rush on the right and mopped up what was left in the nullah.

D Company's leading platoon

came into it a little later, and from the high nullah bank shot and bombed down into the Mahsuds, now outting up the wounded and stripping the dead, and sent them hurrying back to their position among the rocks on the far side; but the damage was done.

Seeing his best subadar drop, Hodkin turned to try and help him out, and so died, after the eternal manner of the P.B.I., quietly, unostentatiously, trying to help some one else out of a hole.

And with him died that day, in similar fashion, a goodly gathering, the pick of C Company, and the rest fell back to the near bank under cover of D Company's fire.

Then further offensive action being hopeless (the intelligence reports put the enemy round the Dazzle Hill flank as somewhere near 1000 strong), C and D Companies of "Nobody's Own" settled down to hold what they had made, while behind them the Pioneers and some of the 55th, and later the 57th, soratohed up up a rough perimeter. And always from the lower slopes of Dazzle Hill the enemy harassed them with lead, until finally they were withdrawn at nightfall to the comparative quiet of the riverbed.

So, like the 2/76th on the right, only on a smaller scale, "Nobody's Own" cheerfully stuck it out on the left, for "the safety of the column depended entirely entirely on the staunchness of the troops."

After I had explained my errand and given the C.O. a

brief idea of the situation on Flathead, the Jemadar adjutant was sent along to D Company to collect a party to reinforce Birmingham's pioquet. Meanwhile, oadging a drink of chlorinated Zam water impregnated with much camel, and a cigarette, from the adjutant, I settled down for five minutes' easy.

The 57th had come in and were taking over the perimeter this side, and things seemed to have steadied somewhat. Just below us, however, in the bed of the stream at the entrance to the Asa Khan nullah, was the finest mix-up imaginable.

The nucleus of it was Asa Khan kach, a medley of fieldambulance tents and wounded, round which revolved a stream of baggage parties hunting kit, and working-parties seeking stores. From the field ambulance to the rook-strewn foot of Flathead, across the stony bed of the river, choking all the streams, was a jammed mass of camels, some laden, some unladen, and a swarm of mules. About Asa Khan itself three sections of guns, more or less back to back, fired steadily -their cooked - up muzzles barely clearing the crowd of men and animals which surged about them.

The small terrace round the tower was column H.Q., and there we could see the anxious little red-tabbed group of the staff. There was not much for them to do just then, with evening coming on apace and every man employed, though Q. side were of course busy trying to evolve some kind of

ordered camp out of the chaotio mess around.

High up on Flathead, outlined against the purpling evening sky, could be seen the groups of the picquets from Duke's Nese to the Flathead knoll, but the ground beyond where lay the 2/76th was invisible from the river.

Along the edge of the right bank the 55th and 57th were digging themselves in, and an energetic sapper-and-miner section were trying to wire a bit of ground to our right, doubtless much to the snipers' joy. They got the officer with the section and a couple of his men before nightfall, but little things like that are not allowed to interfere with work carried on by that corps of enthusiasts, the R.E., and the wiring continued into the night.

Time was getting on, so I got to my feet to look for those men I had demanded, and the adjutant got up too, saying, "I'll go and hurry 'em up."

Then another flight of buzzing insects hummed all about us, and two or three men dropped, a pawn or two more in the game gone. But one bullet mortally wounded the adjutant, and so "Nobody's Own" were the poorer by the irreplaceable loss of a firstclass, much-loved officer, when half an hour later the soul of yet another brave and courteous gentleman followed the Babe and Hodkin and a hundred more into the purple haze that grew about the distant western hills.