I had seen him just as he was leaving for the fight, some hours before.
He carried no weapon but a walking-stick. "I have never carried anything
else into action," he said, "and I am not going to begin now." He was
ill with rheumatism and looked it, and the doctor had advised that he
ought not to be with his company. But he came back to them that evening
for the fight; and one could see that it made a world of difference to
them. He was a man whom his own men swore by. Personally, one breathed
more easily knowing that he was with them. It would be his last big
fight, he told me.

Half-way through that charge, in the thick of the whirl of it, he was
seen standing, leaning heavily upon his stick. It was touch and go at
the moment whether the trench was won or lost. "Are you hit, sir?"
asked several around him. Then they noticed a gash in his leg and the
blood running from it--and he seemed to be hit through the chest as
well.

"I will reach that trench if the boys do," he said.

"Have no fear of that, sir," was the answer. A sergeant asked him for
his stick. Then--with the voice of a big man, like his officer, the
sergeant shouted, and waved his stick, and took the men on. In the
half-dark his figure was not unlike that of his commander. They made one
further rush and were in the trench.

They were utterly isolated in the trench when they reached it. A German
machine-gun was cracking away in the same trench to their right, firing
between them and the trench they had come from. There was barbed wire in
front of it. When they tried to force a way with bombs up the trench to