Yet he knew his duty as a soldier, and he did not hesitate. He directed the range of the batteries to be shortened until the shells were bursting over the trench, and his chum fell, pierced with bullets. That same evening the major himself was found--dead by his own hand, a revolver by his side. Corporal Glasgow was carried to a dressing-station with sixteen bullets from British shrapnel in his leg, and his friend of the cigarette episode had been shot through the brain. That terrible night furnished a long list of casualties for the British, but Ypres had been saved, and the road to Calais was still guarded by the thin khaki line. VI--THE BRITISH SERGEANT'S UNCONSCIOUS FIGHT FOR LOVE Lance-Corporal W. Bird, of the 1st Battalion Norfolk Regiment, who was also wounded at Ypres, recounted the following incident to me. Its central figure is a sergeant of his own regiment, and it commences in those first vivid days of the war, when the Germans were swarming over the border. A company of ragged Chasseurs d'Afrique had burst through a village. Some limped and were blood-stained; all breathed heavily in great gasps, and they were plastered with mud and haggard for want of food and sleep. "It's all up, Mother Vinot," shouted the corporal, a burly Alsatian, to a shivering old creature outside the village _débit_. "The Boches are upon us." Hobbling into the wine-shop, the old woman bade her grandson hasten the loading of the bullock wagon. He was a tall, weedy lad fresh from school. "They won't hurt us, _petite gran'mère_," said he. He lifted his belt, displaying the thick butt of a revolver he had taken from a dead hussar lying under his horse on the roadside. "I will protect both you and the English milady, _nom de pipe_. These are great times for men." The English milady huddled closer to the fire. She had only left Brussels on the previous day; the wagon on which she had travelled had broken down in the mud. While his grandmother hid their last barrel of cognac under the flooring, Jean busied himself with the bullock wagon. It was soon loaded, for their household effects were not extensive. Clambering into the vehicle, they sat their bullocks ambling through the deserted street. Here and there lay groups of dead soldiers; over the bodies the bullocks picked their way carefully. The roar of the cannon and the ear-splitting crack of the rifles had now ceased. The Germans were advancing cautiously upon the village. The boy urged the unwilling beasts with his goad. Inside the wagon, the English milady shuddered in horror at the spectacle of the stark bodies around them, and at last she broke into sobs. The crone, who sat at the shafts of the vehicle telling her beads, looked curiously at her. The lady was speaking. "Last night I dreamed he was dead," she cried, in French. "I fear to look at these poor creatures; I fear I may find him among them."