’There is no other course open to us but to fight it out.  Every position must be held to the last man:  there must be no retirement.  With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight to the end.  The safety of our homes and the freedom of mankind depend alike upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.’

The Squire read and re-read the words.  He was sitting close to the tall French window where through some fine spring days Desmond had lain, his half-veiled eyes wandering over the woods and green spaces which had been his childhood’s companions.  There—­submissive for himself, but, for England’s sake, and so that his mind might receive as long as possible the impress of her fate, an ardent wrestler with Death through each disputed hour—­he had waited; and there, with the word England on his lips, he had died.  The Squire could still see the marks made on the polished floor by the rolling backward of the bed at night.  And on the wall near there was a brown mark on the wall-paper.  He remembered that it had been made by a splash from a bowl of disinfectant, and that he had stared at it one morning in a dumb torment which seemed endless, because Desmond had woke in pain and the morphia was slow to act.

England!  His boy was dead—­and his country had its back to the wall.  And he—­what had he done for England, all these years of her struggle?  His carelessness, his indifference returned upon him—­his mad and selfish refusal, day by day, to give his mind, or his body, or his goods, to the motherland that bore him.

‘Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?’

No—­it had been nothing to him.  But Desmond, his boy, had given everything.  And the death-struggle was still going on. ’Each one of us must fight on to the end.’ Before his eyes there passed the spectacle of the Army, as he had actually seen it—­a division, for instance, on the march near the Salient, rank after rank of young faces, the brown cheeks and smiling eyes, the swing of the lithe bodies.  And while he sat there in the quiet of the April evening, thousands of boys like Desmond were offering those same lithe bodies to the Kaiser’s guns without murmur or revolt because England asked it.  Now he knew what it meant—­now he knew!

There was a knock at the door, and the sound of something heavy descending.  The Squire gave a dull ‘Come in.’  Forest entered, dragging a large bale behind him.  He looked nervously at his master.

‘These things have just come from France, sir.’

The Squire started.  He walked over in silence to look while Forest opened the case.  Desmond’s kit, his clothes, his few books, a stained uniform, a writing-case, with a number of other miscellaneous things.

Forest spread them out on the floor, his lips trembling.  On several nights before the end Desmond had asked for him, and he had shared the Squire’s watch.