They hacked their way into the trench, but their triumph was short-lived. Things had gone badly on the left, and the signal to retire flashed along the line. With horrible blaspheming, the Brindles gave up their trench and started back for their own line. When he was half-way across a bullet struck Montague in the shoulder, then another in the thigh, and he sank to the ground unconscious. When he awoke the moonlight was streaming over the stricken field. He bit his lip to keep from crying out at the sudden spasm of pain in his shoulder, and then something he saw almost stopped the beating of his heart. A figure was slowly crawling towards him, inch by inch, but steadily, ominously coming nearer with every moment. His left arm was helpless, and he tried to reach for his bayonet by turning over. "Pard, are you dead?" Never did sounds of sweetest music fall more gratefully on human ears than the words uttered by Private Waller on the night of October 16, 1916, on No Man's Land, Somewhere in France. "Thank God!" cried Montague, his voice weak and quavering. "Waller--old--boy." "Damn!" muttered Private Waller. The Germans, with customary fiendishness, were searching the ground with rifle-fire to prevent any attempt at rescue. "Are you much hurt, pard?" "I'm used up pretty bad," Montague answered weakly, and in incorrect English. Things change in No Man's Land. "I'm the third as has come after you," whispered Waller; "Sykes and Thompson got theirs." "Coming--for me?" Montague's voice trailed off into a querulous sob. "Sure--those of us as got back shook hands on it that we'd get the Duke back dead or alive." Montague tried to speak, but only two scalding tears slowly trickled down his cheeks. He was weak from loss of blood, and he was learning a bitter lesson in the moonlight on the stricken field. "I'll hoist you up as easy as I can," whispered Private Waller eagerly, "and I'll sort of crawl; and if they spot us, I'll let you down easy. Come on, pard." Fifty yards--that was all--but fifty yards of unspeakable agony. The blood flowed again from Dennis's wounds and matted over Waller's hair. A dozen times he would have fainted, but he grit his teeth, and crawling, grasping, falling, Waller took him to the edge of the trench. And then a bullet caught the little man, and he dropped. "Good-bye, pard," he said. So died Private W. Waller, of His Majesty's Canadian Expeditionary Force. X Almost a year later, a one-armed man was walking along a quiet street in the northern suburbs of a great Canadian city. He paused at a pretty little cottage that nestled in a well-kept garden to speak to a young woman whose black dress was mute testimony to her tragic bereavement.