Another man also thought of wife and kids. "In a night fight one of the Gloucesters had his rifle knocked out of his hand, and a big German lunged at him with a bayonet. Quick as lightning one of his mates sprang between him and the German, and received the thrust in his chest. He died within an hour, and when they asked him why he did it, his answer was, 'Oh, God, I couldn't help it. He's got a wife and kids.'" A corporal of the Bedfordshire Regiment wrote: "Near our trenches there were a lot of wounded, and their cries for water were pitiful. In the trenches was a quiet chap of the Engineers, who could stand it no longer. He collected all the water bottles he could lay hold of, and said he was going out. The air was thick with shell and rifle fire, and to show yourself at all was to sign your death warrant. That chap knew it as well as we did, but that was not going to stop him. He got to the first man all right and gave him a swig from a bottle. No sooner did he show himself than the Germans opened fire. After attending to the first man he crawled along the ground to others until he was about a quarter of a mile away from us. Then he stood up and zigzagged towards another batch of wounded, but that was the end of him. The German fire got hotter and hotter. He was hit badly, and with just a slight upward fling of his arms he dropped to earth like the hero he was. Later he was picked up with the wounded, but he was as dead as they make them out here. The wounded men for whose sake he had risked and lost his life thought a lot of him, and were greatly cut up at his death. One of them who was hit so hard that he would never see another Sunday said to me as we passed the Engineer chap, who lay with a smile on his white face, and had more bullets in him than would set a battalion of sharpshooters up in business for themselves, 'He was a rare good one, he was. It's something worth living for to have seen a deed like that, and now that I have seen it, I don't care what becomes of me.' That's what we all felt about it." One of the King's Royal Rifles told in a letter how a Highlander milked a cow under rifle and shell fire to get something for his wounded mates to drink when the water ran out. Also how a boy of the Connaught Rangers rushed out of the trenches under heavy fire to an orchard near by to get an apple for a wounded comrade who was suffering from thirst and hunger. "He got the apple all right, but he got a German bullet or two in him as well on the way back, and dropped dead within 50 feet of the goal. The wounded chap had his apple brought in after an artillery man had been wounded in getting at it. I hope he valued it, for it was the costliest apple I ever heard tell of bar one, and that was a long time ago."