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For the twenty-four hours they had been in camp under his walls the Maharajah had taken no more notice of Colonel Starr and his three hundred Midlanders than if they represented so many jungle bushes. To all Colonel Starr's messages, diplomatic, argumentative, threatening, there had come the same unsatisfactory response the Maharajah of Chita had no word to say to the British Raj.
To come gradually into London from the North, to pass from the Manchester train half-full of Midlanders through Bloomsbury into the preoccupied, struggling, and untidy Strand this gave no shock, typified nothing definite.
Sunni knew. Two days later, Moti and Sunni heard the English bugles half a mile away. They were playing 'Weel may the keel row! the regimental march-past, as Colonel Starr's Midlanders did the last half mile to their camping-ground. The boys were in the courtyard among the horses, and Sunni dropped the new silver bit he was looking at, held up his head, and listened.
In the opinion of little Lieutenant Pink the fighting should have been over and done with yesterday, and the 17th Midlanders should be 'bagging' the Maharajah's artillery by now. Little Lieutenant Pink was spoiling for the fray. So were the men, most of them. They wanted a change of diet.
Here they encountered Scots and Midlanders and fierce fighting ensued. The Germans were well provided with machine guns, and from windows and roofs sent a withering fire upon the British as they swarmed into the streets of the village.
The farm had been shelled by our artillery time after time, until the whole ground for miles round was one huge mass of shell-craters, but the Germans, in their dug-outs forty and fifty feet underground, could not be reached by shell-fire. I will not go into details of how the place was eventually taken by the Midlanders it will remain an epic of the war. The weather was now breaking up.
There is also still in France a pre-understanding and ready welcome for those rarer and rarely gratified men, who are too comprehensive to find satisfaction in any kind of fatherlandism, and know how to love the South when in the North and the North when in the South the born Midlanders, the "good Europeans."
The gallantry of Colonel Williams of the Midlanders an Ontario battalion was especially conspicuous, but he never returned from the Northwest to receive the plaudits of his countrymen, as he died of fever soon after the victory he did so much to win at Batoche.
Having thus, in a word, revealed his ambition for a career above courts, marts, and polling booths, George breathed more deeply than usual, and, turning his face from the lovely companion whom he had just made his confidant, gazed out at the dancers with an expression in which there was both sternness and a contempt for the squalid lives of the unyachted Midlanders before him.
The Midlanders rode straight at the guns and sabred every artilleryman at his piece. The Londoners say they heard all the guns stop dead at the same moment and they knew they had been silenced in true Balaclava style.
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