Then he was silent again, and while I walked by his side I thought back to his career as I had known it in the war, rather well. He had always been tortured by agonised perplexities. I had guessed that by the look of the man and some of his odd phrases, and his restlessness and foolhardiness. It was in the trenches by Fricourt that I had first seen him--long before the battles of the Somme. He was sitting motionless on a wooden box, staring through a periscope towards the mine craters and the Bois Français in No Man’s Land. The fine hardness of his profile, the strength of his jaw, not massive, but with one clean line from ear to chin, and something in the utter intensity of his attitude, attracted my attention, and I asked the Colonel about him. “Who is that fellow--like a Norman knight?” The Colonel of the King’s Royal Rifles laughed as we went round the next bay, ducking our heads where the sandbags had slipped down. “Further back than Norman,” he said. “He’s the primitive man.” He told me that Wickham Brand--a lieutenant then--was a young barrister who had joined the battalion at the beginning of ’15. He had taken up sniping and made himself a dead shot. He had the hunter’s instinct and would wait hours behind the sandbags for the sight of a German head in the trenches opposite. He seldom missed his man, or that part of his body which showed for a second. Lately he had taken to the habit of crawling out into No Man’s Land and waiting in some shell-hole for the dawn, when Germans came out to mend their wire or drag in a dead body. He generally left another dead man as a bait for the living. Then he would come back with a grim smile and eat his breakfast wolfishly, after cutting a notch in one of the beams of his dug-out. “He’s a Hun-hater, body and soul,” said the Colonel. “We want more of ’em. All the same, Brand makes me feel queer by his ferocity. I like a humourous fellow who does his killing cheerfully.” After that I met Brand and took a drink with him in his dug-out. He answered my remarks gruffly for a time. “I hear you go in for sniping a good deal,” I said, by way of conversation. “Yes. It’s murder made easy.” “Do you get many targets?” “It’s a waiting game. Sometimes they get careless.” He puffed at a black old pipe, quite silent for a time. Presently he told me about a “young’un” who popped his head over the parapet, twice, to stare at something on the edge of the mine-crater. “I spared him twice. The third time I said, ‘Better dead,’ and let go at him. The kid was too easy to miss.” Something in the tone of his voice told me that he hated himself for that. “Rather a pity,” I mumbled. “War,” he said. “Bloody war.” There was a candle burning on the wooden bench on which he leaned his elbow, and by the light of it I saw that his eyes were bloodshot. There was a haggard look on his face. “It must need some nerve,” I said, awkwardly, “to go out so often in No Man’s Land. Real pluck.”