"Devil take it," he cried bitterly, "I know it was Jack's voice—now. I knew it the next day when it was too late. What he said exactly I shall never know—at the time it made no impression on me; but at this moment, almost like a spirit voice in my brain, I can hear him. I can hear him asking me to watch him. I can hear him pleading—I can hear his dreadful fear of being found afraid. As a whisper from a great distance I can hear one short sentence—'Jerry, my God, Jerry—I'm frightened!'
"Winkle, he turned to me in his weakness—that boy who had never failed before, that boy who had reached the breaking-point—and I heeded him not. I was too dead beat; my brain couldn't grasp it."
"But, Jerry," I cried, "it turned out all right the next day; he..." The words died away on my lips as I met the look in his eyes.
"You'd better let me finish," he interrupted wearily. "Let me get the whole hideous tragedy off my mind for the first and the last time. Early next morning we attacked. In the dim dirty light of dawn I saw the boy's face as he moved off to his platoon; and even then I didn't remember those halting sentences that had come to me out of the night. So instead of ordering him to the rear on some pretext or other as I should have done, I let him go to his platoon.
"As we went across the ground that morning through a fire like nothing I had ever imagined, a man wavered in front of me. I felt it clean through me. I knew fear had come. I shouted and cheered—but the wavering was spreading; I knew that too. So I shot him through the heart from behind at point-blank range as I had trained myself to do—in that eternity ago—before the war. The counter attack was successful."
"Great Heavens, Jerry!" I muttered, "who did you shoot?" though I knew the answer already.
"The man I shot was Jack Delawnay. Whether at the time I was actively conscious of it, I cannot say. Certainly my training enabled me to act before any glimmering of the aftermath came into my mind. This is the aftermath."
I shuddered at the utter hopelessness of his tone, though the full result of his action had not dawned on me yet; my mind was dazed.
"But surely Jack was no coward," I said at length.
"He was not; but on that particular morning he gave out. He had reached the limit of his endurance."