"Don't yu never fret, boy. They'll come for 'ee fast enough when they want 'ee." No one, least of all perhaps his mother, could take quite seriously that little square short-footed man, born when she was just seventeen. Sure of work because he was first-rate with every kind of beast, he was yet not looked on as being quite 'all there.' He could neither read nor write, had scarcely ever been outside the parish, and then only in a shandrydan on a Club treat, and he knew no more of the world than the native of a small South Sea Island. His life from school age on had been passed year in, year out, from dawn till dark, with the cattle and their calves, the sheep, the horses and the wild moor ponies; except when hay or corn harvest, or any exceptionally exacting festival absorbed him for the moment. From shyness he never went into the bar of the Inn, and so had missed the greater part of village education. He could of course read no papers, a map was to him but a mystic mass of marks and colours; he had never seen the sea, never a ship; no water broader than the parish streams; until the war had never met anything more like a soldier than the constable of the neighbouring village. But he had once seen a Royal Marine in uniform. What sort of creatures these Germans were to him--who knows? They were cruel--he had grasped that. Something noxious, perhaps, like the adders whose backs he broke with his stick; something dangerous like the chained dog at Shapton Farm; or the big bull at Vannacombe. When the war first broke out, and they had called the younger blacksmith (a reservist and noted village marksman) back to his regiment, the little cowman had smiled and said: "Wait till regiment gets to front, Fred'll soon shoot 'em up."