There was only one man wholly uninjured—the terror-haunted Wright, who ran out, splashed with other men’s blood, took screaming to his heels and collapsed a mile along the road. There he lay till long after the bell of St. Nicholas had rung an "All Clear" to the town—until long after the ambulances telephoned for from the hospitals outside had loaded up in the streets across which cordons had been drawn by military police and French firemen. Men and fragments of men were taken from the ruins, some speedily, some after much search; and among them Private Tully, past terror, but breathing, still alive but only alive. He spoke but a few times after the explosion had broken him, and the men who lifted him on a stretcher to the ambulance and out of it could see that he suffered not at all; the shifting and handling that was torture to others left his maimed and mauled body unaffected. The injury to the spine that was killing him had bereft him of the power of pain as well as of the power of movement, and in the hospital, where a few minutes’ drive from the ruins landed him, he lay quietly alive for a day or two, for the most part dumb and unconscious, but with intervals of sense and lucid speech. Once, in such an interval, he whispered to the nurse that his wife, too, was buried in France; whereby she saw that he knew he was about to die. Later he asked that some one would write to Edith Haynes, and tried to explain who she was. "No relation—just a lady I know.... I should like her to hear." The last person he spoke to was a chaplain, a young man making his round of the ward, who, seeing intelligence in the pale blue eyes, bent over the bed to ask if there was anything he wanted. The chaplain had been warned by a sister that here was a hopeless case, and he spoke very gently and bent very low for the answer. It drifted out faintly in a slow and expressionless whisper. "No, thank you," said William. "I don’t seem to have been much good ... but there comes a time ... when nothing matters." "Not even," asked the chaplain, feeling his way, "the sense that you have done your duty?" "Most people do that," said William. "The question is ... if you’ve been much use when you’ve done it." The chaplain, puzzled, said something of infinite mercy and the standard of God not being as the standard of man. "If you’ve done your best..." he suggested. "Most people do that," said William again ... and slid back once more into silence. * * * * * He was buried without mourners, save those detailed for the duty; who, none the less, stiffened in salute of his coffin and called him farewell on the bugle. His death, duly entered in the hospital books, was reported to the Casualty Department; and the Graves Registration clerks took note of his burial and filed it for possible inquiries.