difficulty which results from that the world remain "safe for democracy" or, to get rid of the jargon of the Professor at the Conference Table, safe for France, for Belgium, for Italy, and last but not least, safe for the British Empire? The Treaty-makers have done what they could, though the world is not quite satisfied that Wisdom is justified of her Four Big Children. Peace now rests with those who are charged with the settlement of the financial problem, and that is complicated enough in all conscience for men whose minds have not been trained to think in billions. Inevitably, the need being so great, they are engrossed with the question of present payment. But the problem cannot be solved completely unless, with a great prevision, the terms of the settlement ensure Peace for future generations. Nor can it be solved unless Tommy's homely philosophy be borne in mind," The world would be a funny place if you went on hating for ever." KHUDU. BY L. V. S. B. THE hard-faced mounted infantry havildar, who carried the furrows of a Bavarian grenade across his cheek,walked his smart little Arab stallion along the front of the flying column. First a sheepskinbonneted Kurdish "Dahbashi" made his report, then an upstanding regular Yusafzai Naik of bombers, after him the bobbed-haired hawk-nosed Khattak commander of the Lewis-gun section, and finally, a slit-eyed, wizen-faced "onepip " Mongol, who led the couple of score Hazara foot levies who formed the bulk of the tiny army. With a final glance at the dozen raking Khurasan mules, to see that their cargo of "303 in chargers was correct and properly loaded, the "vieux moustache" wheeled to his chief, and, cutting away his hand, reported "all present and correct." The Pathan “Wurdi - major" who had, twenty minutes before, been designated to command the column, clattered on his big Waler mare up the narrow cobbled street of the village to obtain the major's permission to march off. He found him standing in his shirt-sleeves, a sheaf of signal messages in his hand, with the Captain of at the door of the little shanty wherein a solitary British soldier, with the aid of a "D Mark III.," kept the outposts in touch with their main body, nearly 150 miles away, across three ranges of hills. A moment later a couple of brief words of command brought the motley force up the "High Street." Debouching from the village, whose eastern disorderliness was tinged with a certain raffish south European flavouring of glazed shop fronts, whitewash, and blue paint, it passed the billet of the regular Pathan and Punjabi N.C.O.'s, which they had adorned with round iron tables and garden chairs set about with a few laboriously-tended shrubs, the result of the restaurant habit, acquired in Flanders, that they had transplanted to Khurasan. A few yards farther up, the "shabby genteel" guard of Gendarmerie turned out in their brown-paper accoutrements and tin swords, and paid the appropriate compliments in the Swedish fashion. Half a mile beyond, the force had climbed gently up a stony glen on to a triangular plateau, perhaps as large as Kensington Gardens, that marked the water parting between the Caspian basin and matchlock shot to the Wurdi- gunners released certain straps major's right, a couple of on their pack saddles, the bombers looked again to their safety-pins and checked their detonators, whilst the section commanders of the infantry made sure that each man's magazine was charged. . sentry groups" of regular sepoys looked down a steep slope over a crenelated granite fortalice, held by an insanitary Soviet garrison; and out on to the immense plain of Turkistan, that stretches northward without a hill, to the shore of the Arctic Ocean. In a tiny "Christian" hamlet a mile below, half a dozen recentlycolonised families of the "Molokan "sect had exchanged the oppression of "Orthodox " Imperial Chenovniks for the tortures, shootings, and pillage of innumerable " "Red" commissars. These upholders of liberty and the rights of man divided their business hours between "nationalising the few bushels of grain the "Molokani" struggled to grow on the stony sun-baked slopes, and squeezing the tatterdethe tatterdemalion Persian donkey-drivers that carried charcoal and firewood across that rugged frontier. Once on the plateau, at a word from the Wurdi-major three or four files of the Kurdish horsemen galloped ventre à terre, as was their wont, tails, manes, and sheepskin bonnets streaming in the wind, left hand down steadying the butt of the slung long Lee Metford, to their places to cover the front of the column. Threading their way between the tiny patches of stunted corn, still green, that covered The column had been sent out at twenty minutes' notice to relieve an anxious situation and a post of levies cut off by insurgent Kurds. The Wurdi-major was fully aware of the many difficulties that beset his chief, but he was no unworthy son of that famous Corps whose father, the never-to-be-forgotten Lumsden, chose for his following men who are not easily taken aback in any emergency "; and behind him were a leavening of men who, refusing to be taken aback in that most deadly of all emergencies that ever threatened the King's troops, attacked into the gascloud and held the German advance on that fatal 26th of April 1915. The little outpost position was held by two regular companies, one of young Punjabi infantry, the other of Indians, and the first had arrived but two hours before. Thirty miles along the metalled motor road to the north, a whole Bolshevik division, with quick-firing artillery, aeroplanes, and armoured cars threatened the little post, and awaited the opening that their "political department" had worked to that the Wurdi-major was deputed to close. For some weeks past the Soviet had cultivated the acquaintance of a certain Khuda Verdi Sardar, a petty Kurdish chief, who had been the Macheath of those parts, even to the collecting of seventeen wives, wenches, and what-nots, some not uncomely. The advent of our troops had caused a depressing dulness in the bandit industry, and Khudu, as he was familiarly called, listened readily to the wooings of Comrade Paskutski. And Comrade Paskutski sweetened his promises by the despatch, by smugglers' paths, of several hundred magazine rifles and a dozen machine-guns to Khudu's ancestral chateau that topped an inaccessible crag in the recesses of the Aleh Dagh. but warily through the hostile valleys, the three or four patrols of our Kurdish levies, under their regular Pathan and Punjabi instructors, that had watched the 160 miles of wild rocky frontier through the snows and blizzards of the past winter, concentrated at the clump of hamlets that nestled in the border valley of Jiristan. Jiristan, twenty-two toilsome rocky miles away, was now the Wurdi-major's objective, for it had at once been invested by some 400 of the insurgents, not before a reinforcement of a further half squadron of our own Kurdish levies had reached it, plus the doubtful accretion of a a company of regular (save the mark!) Persian infantry. The whole lot had now been invested for four days by several times their number of insurgents, and their scanty stock of ammunition had begun to run low. Even the most dull - witted understood that the revolt had been organised by the Bolsheviks to draw off some of the regular infantry from the outposts, and so leave the only metalled road that led into Khurasan open for their armoured cars and lorries full of troops. Three days before, rendered pot-valiant by all these weapons, and by the impassioned orations of Bolshevik and PanTurk orators, Khudu had allowed his revolt to blaze out. The spark that kindled the tinder was indeed the uninvited butting-in of the ubiquitous young British subaltern to the scene of a gun-running. In a few hours every one of Khudu's ragged adherents that owned a Russian "Trokh-linie" ("3line" rifle) or a "Territorial Lee Enfield, was on his little shaggy stallion in the tail of his chief. The first casualty was the British subaltern, but points were soon notched Still the ammunition quesagainst the other home team tion was urgent, and so on The regulars were accordingly prohibited from partaking in any move to relieve Jiristan, or to carry ammunition to its garrison. Kurd levies took out three or four mules under the leadership of an impetuous young lance-dafadar, an Awan from the Punjab Salt Range, a tribe, incidentally, that had a percentage of its voluntarily enlisted young men killed in the war twice larger than that of any county in England. This rash youth decided to bullock his way through the first defile, and had all his men hit in a few minutes by accurate rifle-fire at the closest of ranges. It was a wounded man from this party that brought the report that led to the despatch of the Wurdimajor's little column, in order to clear matters up, and here we return to follow its fortunes. Arrived at the far end of the plateau, the leading files scrambled down. 200 feet of declivity into the rough valley of Bardar, through which a mule-track ran up, over a pass of 7000 feet, and down the other side straight to the objective. The valley floor was still wide wide enough for the mounted men to remain out watching the flanks, which the Wurdi-major made good before committing his main body into the narrow defiles. The sun was already dipping towards the Caspian when the column and its mules filed past the fourth-class frontier customs house, in which a dilapidated, down-at-heels Persian prince kept innumerable accounts and excellent, if bureaucratic, French. The young nobleman was on his doorstep under the faded "Lion and Sun." A pleasant smile on his engaging countenance and his fulsome salutations greeted the column. No doubt he was heartily glad to see threescore tough and nubbly, if thick-headed, bayonets that would get his land out of the mess that it was embroiled in. "What warriors we Persians would be were there no killing in the matter." A couple of miles beyond the village the valley began to narrow in. The lower slopes, though grass-covered, were too steep for even the cat-like Kurdish ponies, whilst above them sprang rocky scarps that approached the perpendicular. Spread over the lower slopes was a tangle of birch and dwarf cedar, liberally laced with boulders and precipitous side valleys. The mountain wall to the right of the column's advance towered up in bare yellow cliffs to 10,000 feet, dividing the valley from Russian territory, and crossed by many toilsome smugglers' tracks that debouched into labyrinthine side valleys opening on to the line of march. On the other flank a sheer wall of black granite leapt stark and unbroken to nearly 11,000 feet, and over a shoulder of this a goat-track led straight down into the valley of Ogaz, the hotbed of all the revolting factions, a wild domain dotted |