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By Root 7868 0

you, ma'am, we trod on the frozen faces of dead Germans as we doubled...A terrible lot of Germans we'd killed a day or so before...That was no doubt the reason they give up the trenches so easy: difficult to attack from, they was...Anyhow, they left the dead for us to bury, knowing probably they were going, with a better 'eart!...But it fair put the wind up me anyhow to think of what their counter-attack was going to be...The counter-attack is always ten times as bad as the preliminary resistance. They 'as you with the rear of their trenches--the parados, we call it--as your front to boot. So I was precious glad when the moppers-up and supports come and went through us...Laughing, they was...Wiltshires...My missus comes from that country...Mrs Cowley, I mean...So I'd seen the captain go down earlier on and I'd said: "There's another of the best stopped one..."' He dropped his voice a little: he was one of the noted yarners of the regiment: 'Caught 'is foot, 'e 'ad, between two 'ands...Sticking up out of the frozen ground...As it might be in prayer...Like this!' He elevated his two hands, the cigar between the fingers, the wrists close together and the fingers slightly curled inwards: 'Sticking up in the moonlight...Poor devil!'

Tietjens said:

'I thought perhaps it was 0 Nine Morgan I saw that night...Naturally I looked dead...I hadn't a breath in my body...And I saw a Tommy put his rifle to his pal's upper arm and fire...As I lay on the ground...'

Cowley said:

'Ah, you saw that...I heard the men talking of it...But they naturally did not say who and where!'

Tietjens said with a negligence that did not ring true:

'The wounded man's name was Stilicho...A queer name...I suppose it's Cornish...It was B Company in front of us.'

'You didn't bring 'em to a court martial?' Cowley asked. Tietjens said: No. He could not be quite certain. Though he was certain. But he had been worrying about a private matter. He had been worrying about it while he lay on the ground and that rather obscured his sense of what he saw. Besides, he said faintly, an officer must use his judgement. He had judged it better in this case not to have seen the...His voice had nearly faded away: it was clear to Sylvia that he was coming to a climax of some mental torture. Suddenly he exclaimed to Cowley:

'Supposing I let him off one life to get him killed two years after. My God! That would be too beastly!'

Cowley snuffled in Tietjens' ear something that Sylvia did not catch--consolatory and affectionate. That intimacy was more than she could bear. She adopted her most negligent tone to ask:

'I suppose the one man had been trifling with the other's girl. Or wife!'

Cowley exploded: 'God bless you, no! They'd agreed upon it between them. To get one of them sent 'ome and the other, at any rate, out of that 'ell, leading him back to the dressing-station.' She said:

'You mean to say that a man would do that, to get out of it?...'

Cowley said:

'God bless you, ma'am, with the 'ell the Tommies 'as of it...For it's in the line that the differences between the Other Ranks' life and the officers' comes in...I tell you, ma'am, old soldier as I am, and I've been in seven wars one with another...there were times in this war when I could have shrieked, holding my right hand down...'

He paused and said: 'It was my idea...And it's been a good many others', that if I 'eld my 'and up over the parapet with perhaps my hat on it, in two minutes there would be a German sharpshooter's bullet through it. And then me for Blighty, as the soldiers say...And if that could happen to me, a regimental sergeant-major, with twenty-three years in the service...

The bright orderly came in, said he had found a taxi, and melted into the dimness.

'A man,' the sergeant-major said, 'would take the risk of being shot for wounding his pal...They get to love their pals, passing the love of women...' Sylvia exclaimed: 'Oh!' as if at a pang of toothache. 'They do, ma'am,' he said, 'it's downright touching...'

He was by now very unsteady as he stood, but his voice was quite clear. That was