"When I got that order overnight Jack was with me, in a hole that passed as a dugout. At the moment everything was quiet; the Germans were patching up their new position; only a maxim spluttered away a bit to one flank. To add to the general desolation a steady downpour of rain drenched us, into which, without cessation the German flares went shooting up. I think they were expecting a counter attack at once...." Again he paused, and I waited. "You know the condition one gets into sometimes when one is heavy for sleep. We had it during the retreat if you remember--a sort of coma, the outcome of utter bodily exhaustion. One used to go on walking, and all the while one was asleep--or practically so. Sounds came to us dimly as from a great distance; they made no impression on us--they were just a jumbled phantasmagoria of outside matters, which failed to reach one's brain, except as a dim dream. I was in that condition on the night I am speaking of; I was utterly cooked--beat to the world; I was finished for the time. I've told you this, because I want you to understand the physical condition I was in." He leaned forward and stared at the fire, resting his head on his hands. "How long I'd dozed heavily in that wet-sodden hole I don't know, but after a while above the crackle of the maxim, separate and distinct from the soft splash of the rain, and the hiss of the flares, and the hundred and one other noises that came dimly to me out of the night, I heard Jack's voice--at least I think it was Jack's voice." Of a sudden he sat up in the chair, and rising quickly he came and leant over the foot of the bed. "Devil take it," he cried bitterly, "I know it was Jack's voice--_now_. I knew it the next day when it was too late. What he said exactly I shall never know--at the time it made no impression on me; but at this moment, almost like a spirit voice in my brain, I can hear him. I can hear him asking me to watch him. I can hear him pleading--I can hear his dreadful fear of being found afraid. As a whisper from a great distance I can hear one short sentence--'Jerry, my God, Jerry--I'm frightened!' "Winkle, he turned to me in his weakness--that boy who had never failed before, that boy who had reached the breaking-point--and I heeded him not. I was too dead beat; my brain couldn't grasp it." "But, Jerry," I cried, "it turned out all right the next day; he..." The words died away on my lips as I met the look in his eyes. "You'd better let me finish," he interrupted wearily. "Let me get the whole hideous tragedy off my mind for the first and the last time. Early next morning we attacked. In the dim dirty light of dawn I saw the boy's face as he moved off to his platoon; and even then I didn't remember those halting sentences that had come to me out of the night. So instead of ordering him to the rear on some pretext or other as I should have done, I let him go to his platoon.