one in the emplacement. Then they scrambled out, and the two officers prepared to follow.
“Sir! Sir!”
MacTaggart turned. It was his English Sergeant, Godstone, no longer immaculate, but dishevelled and wild-eyed. The Sergeant saluted.
“I’ve three men along here with their legs off,” he said.
In a flash MacTaggart saw the two possibilities before him. The men were certain to die, and it was pretty certain death for himself and the other two to go back. “Just chucking away extra lives,” he thought, and suddenly found life very desirable. For a second he hesitated. Then he remembered a score of things—his promise that he wouldn’t go back and leave one of them alive in the German trench, his pride that the men had always trusted him and followed him, his affection for the men, and, above all, the eternal principle, as old as war, “An officer can’t desert his men.” He turned to Charlie MacRae, suddenly calm, “Will you watch the left,” he said; “Sergeant Godstone and I will bring these fellows along.”
The impassive MacRae climbed on to the parapet, and sat there with his revolver in his right hand and a bomb in his left. He, too, like MacTaggart, knew that the odds were a
