'I thought the shelling was too heavy, sir, just then; I thought it would be better to go back and wait a bit where there was more cover till the shelling got less....' 'But Sergeant Peters says the party would probably have got through?' 'Yes, sir.' 'In view of the orders you had received, wouldn't it have been better to go straight on?' 'I don't know, sir--perhaps it would.' 'Then why didn't you do that?' 'At the time, sir, I thought it best to go back and wait.' 'And that was what you were doing when you were seen--er, running to the dug-out?' 'Yes, sir.' Well, the Court did not believe it, and I cannot blame them. For I knew that Harry was not being perfectly ingenuous. I knew that he _could_ not have gone on.... Yet it was a reasonable story. And if the Court had been able to imagine themselves in Harry's condition of mind and body, crouching in the wet dark under that bank, faint with weariness and fear, shaken with those blinding, tearing concussions, not knowing what they should do, or what they _could_ do, perhaps they would have said in their hearts, 'I will believe that story.' But they could not imagine it. For they were naturally stout-hearted men, and they had not seen too much war. They were not young enough. And, indeed, it was not their business to imagine that.... Another of the Court asked: 'Is it true to say, as Private Mallins said, that you had--ah--lost your nerve?' 'Well, sir, I had the wind-up pretty badly; one usually does at that corner--and I've had too much of it.' 'I see.' I wondered if he did see--if he had ever had 'too much of it.' Harry said nothing about Burnett; nothing about Philpott; probably it would have done no good. And as he told me afterwards, 'The real charge was that I'd lost my nerve--and so I had. And I don't want to wangle out of it like that.' That was the end of it. They were kind enough, those grey men; they did not like the job, and they wanted only to do their duty. But they conceived that their duty was 'laid down in The Book,' to look at the 'hard facts,' and no further. And the 'hard facts' were very hard.... The Court was closed while they considered their verdict; it was closed for forty minutes, and when it reopened they asked for evidence of character. And that meant that the verdict was 'Guilty.' On the only facts they had succeeded in discovering it could hardly have been anything else. The Adjutant put in formal evidence of Harry's service, age, record, and so on; and I was allowed to give evidence of character. I told them simply the sort of fighting record he had, about Gallipoli, and the scouting, and the job he had refused in England. I am glad to believe that I did him a little good; for that evening it got about somehow that he was recommended to mercy. And perhaps they remembered that he was twenty-three. XIII