"You didn't bring 'em to a court martial?" Cowley asked. Tietjens said: No. He could not be quite certain. Though he was certain. But he had been worrying about a private matter. He had been worrying about it while he lay on the ground and that rather obscured his sense of what he saw. Besides, he said faintly, an officer must use his judgment. He had judged it better in this case not to have seen the . . . His voice had nearly faded away: it was clear to Sylvia that he was coming to a climax of some mental torture. Suddenly he exclaimed to Cowley:
"Supposing I let him off one life to get him killed two years after. My God! That would be too beastly!"
Cowley snuffled in Tietjens' ear something that Sylvia did not catch—consolatory and affectionate. That intimacy was more than she could bear. She adopted her most negligent tone to ask:
"I suppose the one man had been trifling with the other's girl. Or wife!"
Cowley exploded: "God bless you, no! They'd agreed upon it between them. To get one of them sent 'ome and the other, at any rate, out of that 'ell, leading him back to the dressing-station." She said:
"You mean to say that a man would do that, to get out of it? . . ."
Cowley said:
"God bless you, ma'am, with the 'ell the Tommies 'as of it. . . . For it's in the line that the difference between the Other Ranks' life and the officers' comes in. . . . I tell you, ma'am, old soldier as I am, and I've been in seven wars one with another . . . there were times in this war when I could have shrieked, holding my right hand down. . . ."
He paused and said: "It was my idea. . . . And it's been a good many others,' that if I 'eld my 'and up over the parapet with perhaps my hat on it, in two minutes there would be a German sharpshooter's bullet through it. And then me for Blighty, as the soldiers say. . . . And if that could happen to me, a regimental sergeant-major, with twenty-three years in the service . . ."
The bright orderly came in, said he had found a taxi, and melted into the dimness.