Harry Hawke stood in the rain, leaning on his rifle before one of the crosses, reading the simple inscription which the armourer-sergeant had painted for him on the rough wood: "Jim Tiddler, 2/12th R.R.R., aged 21. He was a good pal."
"Yus, he was a good pal," muttered Hawke, "one of the best, and so was Mr. Wetherby. I'm glad old Tiddler's planted alongside 'im."
His wicked little eye ranged away to another chalk mound which had no name upon it. It stood apart from the rest, and was close to that angle of the German salient where Dennis had crouched on the night that all the survivors would remember as long as they remembered anything. An ugly red smear on the sandbags at the head of the mound had not been washed away by the rain.
Two spies had been buried there, after a court martial held in a dug-out, and one of them had been a woman, who had tried to brazen it out in spite of the overwhelming evidence produced against them. Threats, tears, piteous appeals for mercy, Ottilie's big black eyes, all had proved in vain.
Then she had swallowed poison, but the tabloid she tried to pass to her husband was intercepted, and the volley of ball cartridge that dealt stern justice in the grey light of a wet afternoon had rid our lines of a deadly and insidious peril that had cost us many lives.
"Shooting was too good for 'im, the dirty dog," said Private Hawke, as he lit a woodbine and turned away.
And that was the requiem of the Von Dussels!
The weather brightened and the Great Push still rolled on. Day by day the shell dumps grew to incredible size, and the British guns never ceased their remorseless preparations. Names hitherto unknown to British readers became household words to those at home, who, reading between the lines, knew that at last our great and glorious armies were on the high road to victory.
It was not to be yet, but it was coming, slowly but surely, and Mrs. Dashwood, in the old home with the green lawn sloping to the water's edge, wished a thousand times that she had been born a man that she might have taken her share in the great achievement.