That is practically the end of the story, for you can imagine the rest, except, perhaps, that the child, when he had almost reached the hard ground, grew afraid of the sound of firing, the noise overhead, and the gaunt, stark men staring at him in wondering silence. So he turned homeward again, Casper stalking beside him, sacrificing his lust for battle to his duty as foster-father. But they went slowly, the child often turning back to stare with wondering eyes at the increasing chaos behind him and, as the more impressionable among the soldiers would have it, beckoning them to follow him towards safety. Follow they did, but as unbeaten soldiers should, in good order and with due precautions--and so escaped. The Germans lost time before they entered the deserted village, for they feared an ambush. When they _did_ enter, it was long past sunset and the night was too dark to do anything before dawn. Even then they had no guide to show them the track across the marsh, and they were forced to skirt it, losing so much time that the British battalion--if you can call less than three hundred men a battalion--got clear away, and in due course picked up the main body, taking with them Hippolyte and Casper. You would say, if you did not know human nature, that there was no room for a legend of celestial intervention. But you would be wrong. Even in the rescued battalion--long since brought up to strength and upholding its laurels elsewhere in the line--the story holds good that somewhere unspecified on the Belgian frontier an angel, mediæval in every detail down to aureole, wings, and celestial robes, did actually intervene and rescue it from under the very noses of the baffled Boches. And this although Hippolyte, adopted child of the regiment, sports his sergeant-major's uniform for everyone to see, and Casper, brilliantly caparisoned, stalks as a mascot should behind the drums. Elsewhere the legend has assumed new details, as I realized when a very excellent clergyman assured me that it was ... George himself, mounted upon a white horse (so transmogrified, I take it, was black Casper), who rode up and down the line before the 2nd Battalion of the West Loamshires, shaking his sword at the advancing Prussian Guard, who not unnaturally fled in disorder. Perhaps, in Terbeeke, he has by this time become Ste. Gudule, or some other patron saint of the Belgians, with a fiery dragon or whatever be her saintly attributes. I don't know, because, as I say, I was never in Terbeeke, but here at least you have what really happened, as Madame Tavernier told it to me in the front room of her Blanchisserie du Cygne, in the village of Durdegem, and in the presence of Hippolyte himself, who afterwards begged shamelessly for _sous_. A HERO TALE OF THE RED CROSS _Told by G. S. Petroff, War Correspondent of the "Russkoye Slovo," Moscow_ The following incident is narrated in M. Petroff's account of a battle on the eastern front. Translated for _Current History_.