“What?” asked Godfrey, startled. Baltazar pointed downwards. “That,” said he. “Oh!” Godfrey laughed. “I’m one of the lucky ones. Far better to have stopped it with my foot than my head.” “But to limp about on crutches all your life—a fellow like you in the pride of youth and strength. It makes one angry.” “That’s kind of you, sir,” said Godfrey. “But it doesn’t worry me much. They’re wangling a new foot for me, and as soon as I can stick it on, I’ll throw away my crutches, and no one but myself will be a bit the wiser.” “You take it bravely,” said Baltazar. “It’s all in the day’s work. What’s the good of grousing? What’s the point of a real foot, anyway, when a faked one will do as well?” But though Baltazar admired the young fellow’s careless courage, he still glowered at the maimed leg. He resented fiercely the lost foot. He had been robbed of a bit of this wonderful son. “How did you come to get hit?” he asked abruptly. There are many ways of asking a wounded man such a question. Many he loathes. Hence the savagely facetious answers that have been put on record. But there are ways that compel reply. Baltazar’s was one. Godfrey felt strangely affected by the elder man’s earnestness; yet his instinct forbade him to yield at once. “Getting hit’s as simple as being bowled out at cricket. A jolly sight simpler. Like going out in the rain and getting wet. You just go out without an umbrella and something hits you, and that’s the end of it.” “But when was it? How was it?” asked Baltazar. Godfrey, after the way of British subalterns, gave a bald account of his personal adventures in his last fight near Ypres. It might have been a description of a football match. Baltazar wondered. For all his wanderings and experience of life, he had never heard a first-hand account of modern warfare. The psychology of it perplexed and fascinated him. He plied the young man with questions; shrewd, direct questions piercing to the heart of things; and gradually Godfrey’s English reserve melted, and he laid aside his defensive armour and told his intent visitor what he wanted to know. And Baltazar’s swift brain seized the vivid pictures and co-ordinated them until he grew aware of the hells through which this young and debonair gentleman had passed. “And what did you get that for?” He pointed to the ribbon of the Military Cross. “I managed to get away with some machine guns out of a tight corner. It was only when we were scooting back that I discovered we had been left in the air. I thought the battalion was quite up close. If I hadn’t, I should probably have bolted. These things are all flukes.” “What a proud man your father would have been,” said Baltazar. “By the way, yes,” said Godfrey. “I was forgetting. You were a friend of my father’s.” “It’s a great misfortune that he never met you,” said Baltazar. “He disappeared before I was born,” Godfrey remarked drily.