A day or two later the official announcement appeared in the Press, and within a fortnight a less than usually belated dispatch gave an account of the fighting in which he had met his end. A British trench had been lost, regained and once more lost. As our troops fell back the first time, Captain Dainton stayed to assist a wounded subaltern, and it was as the two struggled from the trench into the open that a bullet passed through Tom's heart. Thanks to his assistance, the subaltern, Lieutenant Longton, had regained the British lines, and the name of Captain Dainton was included in the list of recommendations at the end of the dispatch.
Sonia came round the same evening and asked me to accompany her the following Sunday to a private hospital in Portland Place. Longton had been invalided home and was anxious to see any relations of the man who had saved his life. Lady Dainton had already called, but Sonia wanted a first-hand account of her brother's last engagement.
We were unable to add very much to the information given us in the dispatch. It was an affair of seconds—an arm stretched out, a hoist on to the shoulders, a few yards zigzag running, a sudden fall. Longton had crawled back on all fours to his own trench, with a rain of bullets piercing his clothes and furrowing the earth all round him.
"Are you badly hit?" I asked him, when his story was told.
There was a bandage round his head, but he seemed in the finest health and spirits.
"It just touched the skull," he told me. "I think I must have had a moment of concussion. I remember feeling a twenty-ton weight hit me on the top of the head, then a complete blank. The next thing was the feeling that I was being picked up, and I found myself being trotted back with my arms round Dainton's neck. I was perfectly all right by the time I got back to our reserve trench and when the counter-attack started I went along with the rest of them. It was only when we'd been beaten back a second time that I thought I'd better be cleaned up before I got any dirt into the wound."
"Are you in much pain?" Sonia asked.
"I get a bit of a headache sometimes, but I feel as fit as ten men. That's what makes it so sickening to lie here. I want to go out again."
He was a good-looking, fair-haired boy of nineteen, with blue eyes and a ready smile. His face, neck and hands were tanned deep brown with exposure to the sun and wind. He gave me the impression of not having a nerve in his body.