Larrey and his men were the first to reach the deck. They found Davidge and Mamise in a pool of blood rapidly enlarging as the torn arteries in Davidge's shoulder spouted his life away. A quick application of first aid saved him until the surgeon attached to the shipyard could reach him. Mamise's injuries were painful and cruel, but not dangerous. Of Jake Nuddle there was not enough left to assure Larrey of his identification. Of Nicky Easton there was so little trace that the first searchers did not know that he had perished. Davidge and Mamise were taken to the hospital, and when Davidge was restored to consciousness his first words were a groan of awful satisfaction: "I got a German!" When he learned that he had no longer a right arm he smiled again and muttered: "It's great to be wounded for your country." Which was a rather inelegant paraphrase of the classic "_Dulce et decorum_," but caught its spirit admirably. Of Jake Nuddle he knew nothing and forgot everything till some days later, when he was permitted to speak to Mamise, in whose welfare he was more interested than his own, and the story of whose unimportant wounds harrowed him more than his own. Her voice came to him over the bedside telephone. After an exchange of the inevitable sympathies and regrets and tendernesses, Mamise sighed: "Well, we're luckier than poor Jake." "We are? What happened to him?" "He was killed, horribly. His pitiful wife! Abbie has been here and she is inconsolable. He was her idol--not a very pretty one, but idols are not often pretty. It's too terribly bad, isn't it?" Davidge's bewildered silence was his epitaph for Jake. Even though he were dead, one could hardly praise him, though, now that he was dead, Davidge felt suddenly that he must have been indeed the first and the eternal victim of his own qualities. Jake had been a complainer, a cynic, a loafer always from his cradle on--indeed, his mother used to say that he nearly kicked her to death before he was born. Mamise had hated and loathed him, but she felt now that Abbie had been righter than she in loving the wretch who had been dowered with no beauty of soul or body. She waited for Davidge to say something. After a long silence, she asked: "Are you there?" "Yes." "You don't say anything about poor Jake." "I--I don't know what to say." He felt it hateful to withhold praise from the dead, and yet a kind of honesty forced him to oppose the habit of lauding all who have just died, since it cheapened the praise of the dead who deserve praise--or what we call "deserve." Mamise spoke in a curiously unnatural tone: "It was noble of poor Jake to give his life trying to save the ship, wasn't it?" "What's that?" said Davidge, and she spoke with labored precision. "I say that you and I, who were the only witnesses, feel sorry that poor Jake had to be killed in the struggle with Easton." "Oh, I see! Yes--yes," said Davidge, understanding.