With the Main Guard

"With the Main Guard" is an short story by Rudyard Kipling: First published in The Week's News of Allahabad on August 4th 1888, issued in Soldiers Three (Indian Railway Library No. 1) the same year, and collected in Soldiers Three and other Stories in 1899.
It is a stifling June night in Fort Amara at Lahore, and the men are doing all they can to fight off heat exhaustion or worse. Mulvaney gets them through the terrible hours until dawn by telling a tale of a bloody fight by the Black Tyrone and the 'Ould Regiment' against an army of Pathans on the Frontier. But he asks the narrator at the end "...can thim that helps others help thimselves ?" , a question that Kipling, the great teller of tales, must have sometimes asked himself.