I wasn't six paces from him at the time. We were fastening some barbed-wire stays on screw standards we meant to put out to-night. I had just lent him my thick leather gloves after showing him exactly how I wanted these stays fixed, with little stakes bound on at the end of them, so as to save time to-night when we are over the parapet. He was busy as a beaver, as he generally is; a bit nearer to Whizz-bang Corner than was quite wise--I shall always reproach myself for not keeping him farther from that ill-omened spot--when the shell burst low overhead. I got a dozen tiny flicks myself on hands and head, which the M.O. touched up with iodine after he bandaged Tommy Dodd. But Tommy was badly hit in the thigh, one arm, and the left shoulder. He was parchment-colour by the time I got the stretcher-bearers along, and that was only a matter of seconds. We were close to their little dug-out, as it happened. He'd lost a lot of blood. But he grinned at me, with a kind of twist in his grin, as I helped lift him into the trench stretcher. "Looks almost like a Blighty for me, sir, don't it? Well, even the Boche must hit something sometimes. It's only an outer this time, an' look at the thousands o' rounds when he don't get on the target at all! Sorry I couldn't 've finished them stays, sir. If you send for Davis, o' Number 5 Section, you'll find him pretty good at it, sir." And then he turned to the stretcher-bearer in front, who had the strap over his shoulder, and was just bracing himself to start off when he'd done talking. "Home, John!" he says, with a little kick up of his head, which I really can't describe. "An' be sure you don't exceed the limit, for I can't abide them nasty low perlice courts an gettin' fined." And yet, when we got down to Battalion Headquarters, the M.O. told me Tommy Dodd ought by all rights to have been insensible, from the blood he'd lost and the shock of those wounds: not surface wounds, you know. He'll have two or three months of hospital comfort now. I hope to goodness nothing septic will intervene. The Battalion would be the poorer for it if we lost Tommy. The M.O. says he'll pull through. The M.O. cropped little patches of hair off round my head, to rub the iodine in where I was scratched, so I look as if I had ringworm. But to get back to business. I've got to "jot down" this everyday trench routine for you, haven't I? And I only got as far as breakfast in yesterday's letter. We'll get a move on and run through it now. I'm due on deck directly after lunch to relieve Taffy; and it's past eleven now.