"Oh, you know what I mean! Nobody honours the Victoria Cross more than I do, but it is the military form of Extreme Unction. I want him to do things that deserve it, but not to get it. Only about one man out of every hundred who get it ever lives on safely afterwards. If he doesn't die in the actual winning of it, then the Law of Compensation strikes him a little later, as in the case of Warneford. No! Dearly though I love bravery, I myself am not brave enough to want my Boy to win the Victoria Cross." "Well, even if he doesn't happen to win it himself, he's pretty sure to be the cause of some other fellow's winning it. I tell you, he's the best soldier in the whole battalion, and if he were to be killed to-morrow without having had the chance to show all the grit that's in him--the chance to hold his trench single-handed against a horde of Germans--he'd still have done so much by his wonderful influence to stiffen up his men that they'd stand like lions, months after he was in his grave, just because of the memory of him. That's the stuff he's made of. As soon as he gets into the trench, with his gay laugh and the Life, sheer Life, breaking out of every pore of him, all the discomforts and difficulties seem to vanish." "Hasn't he sometimes given way himself?" I asked. "Hasn't he sometimes been very tired and almost broken up?" "Oh, yes--sometimes! But he never minds being tired himself. It was having to urge the tired men on that hurt him, and having to make them work in the trenches when they ought to have rested. He would like to do half their work for them, if he could; but as he can't, he does the next best thing--he puts heart into them to do it. Oh, he loves his men as much as they love him!" "He's Mess President, isn't he?" "I should think he was! And such a cook! He says he's always been fond of cooking, though he's never had much chance to do it. The day before I got hit he made some lovely caper sauce with half a bottle of capers and my tooth-powder. He's a regular schoolboy still; even a troublesome one sometimes." I laughed. "I expect you find that he wants to put things to all sorts of uses they were never meant for, don't you?" "I should just think he does. If a new trench mortar comes along, you'd think it would be just a new trench mortar and there would be an end of it; but that's not so with him. He wants to take it to bits and see if it can't be used for something quite different. But his ideas are sometimes quite good. Two or three months ago, after we'd had a particularly dirty time, he went and got some factory vats and arranged them as baths, and it just happened that the Prime Minister came along unexpectedly when he and two other subalterns were in the vats with nothing whatever on but their identity discs." I laughed again. Oh, if I could only hear him call out here in this house now, as he had done so often before: "Father, can I have a hot bath?"