way he stood, though, so unconsciously erect and steady.
The other men who came in afterwards, with easy greetings
and noisy talk, somehow seemed loud-voiced and
self-assertive.

Tom, to my surprise, refused a cocktail. It seems, as he
explained, that he "got into the way of taking nothing
over there." I noticed that my friend Quiller, who is a
war correspondent, or, I should say, a war editorial
writer, took three cocktails and talked all the more
brilliantly for it through the opening courses of the
dinner, about the story of the smashing of the Hindenburg
line. He decided, after his second Burgundy, that it had
been simply a case of sticking it out. I say "Burgundy"
because we had substituted Burgundy, the sparkling kind,
for champagne at our dinners as one of our little war
economies.

Tom had nothing to say about the Hindenburg line. In
fact, for the first half of the dinner he hardly spoke.
I think he was worried about his left hand. There is a
deep furrow across the back of it where a piece of shrapnel
went through and there are two fingers that will hardly
move at all. I could see that he was ashamed of its
clumsiness and afraid that someone might notice it. So
he kept silent. Professor Razzler did indeed ask him
straight across the table what he thought about the final
breaking of the Hindenburg line. But he asked it with
that same fierce look from under his bushy eyebrows with
which he used to ask Tom to define the path of a tangent,