Curiously enough, the mess cook had already become a casualty. He was another of the faint-hearted and had fallen under a wagon in the fog and been run over. A rib or two went. Poetic justice was rampant that morning. It left me two to deal with. I decided to let it go for the time and see if fate would relieve me of the job. As a matter of fact it didn’t, and many many lifetimes later, when we were out of action, I had the two of them up in a room with a ceiling and a cloth on the table, and the Babe stood at my elbow as a witness. One was a man of about thirty-eight or forty, a long-nosed, lazy, unintelligent blighter. The other was a short, scrubby, Dago-looking, bullet-headed person,--poor devils, both cannon fodder. My face may have looked like a bit of rock but I was immensely sorry for them. Given a moment of awful panic, what kind of intelligence could they summon to fight it, what sort of breeding and heredity was at the back of them? None. You might as well shoot two horses for stampeding at a bursting shell. They were gripped by blind fear and ran for it. They didn’t want to. It was not a reasoned thing. It was a momentary lack of control. But to shoot them for it was absurd, a ridiculous parody of justice. Supposing I had lost my nerve and cleared out? The chances are that being a senior officer I should have been sent down to the base as R.T.O. or M.L.O. and after a few months received the D.S.O. It has been done. They, as Tommies, had only earned the right to a firing party. It seemed to me, therefore, that my job was to prevent any recurrence, so in order to uproot the fear of death I implanted the fear of God in them both. Sweat and tears ran down their faces at the end of the interview,--and I made the Dago my servant forthwith. He has redeemed himself many times under worse shell fire than that barrage of the 21st of March. 24 Headquarters gave me another subaltern during the day. He had been with the battery in the early days at Armentières but for various reasons had drifted to another unit. He joined us just before the order was received to take up another position farther back and lay out a line on the Riez de Cugny. The enemy was apparently coming on. So we hooked in once more about 4.30 in the afternoon and trekked up the road on to a ridge behind which was the village of Villeselve. The Hun seemed to have taken a dislike to it. Five-nines went winging over our heads as we came into action and bumped into the village about two hundred yards behind. The Babe rode back to Brigade to report and ask for orders. There were no means of knowing where our infantry were except through Brigade who were at infantry headquarters, and obviously one couldn’t shoot blind. Meanwhile the Dago servant collected bread and bully and a Tommy’s water bottle, which stank of rum but contained only water, and the Stand-by, the new lad and myself sat under a tree watching the Hun barrage splash in all directions and made a meal.