Benny and I were chums, but nobody knows what that word means till you've kept warm under the same blanket and kneeled side by side in the firing-line. It brings men together like nothing else in the world, and it's queer the unlikely sorts that take to one another. I was so common and uneddicated that I wonder what Benny ever saw to like in me, for, as I said, he was a regular Mommer's boy and splendidly brought up and an electrician. Religious, too, and a church member! But he was powerful fond of me, and never went into action but what he'd let off a little prayer to himself that I might come out all right and go to heaven if bolo-ed. Pity he hadn't taken as much trouble for himself, for one day while we were lying in a trench, and firing for all we were worth, I suddenly saw that look in his face that a soldier gets to know so well. "Benny, you're shot!" I yelled out, dropping my Krag and all struck of a heap. "Shot, nothing!" he answered, and then he keeled over in the dirt and his legs began to kick. He took a powerful long time to die, and there was even some talk of sending him down to the base hospital, the field one being that full and constantly needed at our heels. But he pleaded with the doctors and was allowed as a favour to stay on and die where he was minded--with the battery. I was with him all I could, and I'll never forget how good that commissary sergeant was, a splendid young man named Orr, who always had a little pot of chicken broth for Benny and cornstarch, and what he fancied most of all--a sort of thick dough cakes we called sinkers. As luck would have it I got into trouble about this time--a little matter of two silver candle-sticks and a Virgin's crown--and Benny sent for Captain Howard (it was him that commanded the battery), and weak as he was, dying, he begged me off, and the captain swore awful to hide how bad he felt, and struck my name off the sheet to please him. There was little enough to do in this line, for it was plain as day where Benny was bound for, and he knew himself he would never see that little home in Oakland again. Well, he got worse and worse, and sometimes when I went there he didn't know me, being out of his head or kind of dopy with the doctor's stuff, the shadow being over him, as Irish people say. One night he was that low that I got scared, and I waylaid the contract surgeon as he came out. "Doctor," I said, "it's all up with Benny, ain't it?" "He'll never hear reveille no more," he says.