That night the wounded man died. One who saw him laid to rest in the little burial-ground of the battalion by a ruined farm says the grief of his men at the graveside was poignant to witness. When the dead man first took over the company it was slack and unruly, the worst company in the battalion. The new man who succeeded him told me it was the best company he had ever seen, for the spirit of the dead officer was living in every man. Such are the relations of officer and man; such are the little dramas that keep friendship green in our army in the field. The British soldier’s indifference to danger, while it is one of his finest qualities, is often the despair of his officer. The Irish regiments are the worst. Their recklessness is proverbial. An officer in one of the Irish battalions--he was a “ranker,” and therefore knew his subject--told me some amazing instances of the complete indifference of his men to the dangers of their situation. Crossing a railway on one occasion, in full view of the Germans, he came upon a party of men engaged in setting up bottles along the line. To his vigorous inquiry as to what they were doing, they disingenuously replied that they were setting up targets to shoot at from an angle of the trench! If the Germans had turned on a machine-gun down the line, not one of those men would have escaped alive. I have had more than one experience myself of the British soldier’s indifference to danger. When I was going up to some trenches in the Ypres salient one day, the guide, a particularly stolid-looking private, stopped suddenly on a road and said: “Will you go by the road or the trench, sir?” Of course, I had not the least choice, not knowing the ground, so I asked him which was the shorter way. “The road’s a long way the shorter,” he replied. So we went by the road. But when I told the officers up at the mess in the trenches that I had come by that road they stared, and asked if we had been shelled. I said we had not. Then they told me that that particular stretch of road was one of the most “unhealthy” spots in the neighbourhood by day. The guide was interrogated. “Some takes the road, and some the trench,” he said. “But don’t you know they are always shelling that road?” the officer asked. “They do put one over now and again,” the man replied, “but the road’s a deal shorter, sir!” “You’ll find it a short-cut to heaven one of these days, if you go on using that road,” the officer said, whereat the man grinned broadly.