“The damned fools—­I beg your pardon, Mother, but when a fool is too big a fool even for this world, he must be damned—­the damned fools allow all sorts of things to be given away.  They were nearly the death of me and were the death of half a dozen of my men.”

And he told the story.  In a deserted brewery behind the lines the vats were fitted up as baths for men from the trenches, and the furnaces heated ovens in which horrible clothing was baked.  This brewery had been immune from attack until an officially sanctioned newspaper article specified its exact position.  A few days after the article appeared, in fact, as soon as a copy of the paper reached Germany, a thunderstorm of shells broke on the brewery.  Out of it poured a helter-skelter stream of stark-naked men, who ran wherever they could for cover.  From one point of view it was vastly comic.  In the meanwhile the building containing all their clothes, and all the spare clothing for a brigade, was being scientifically destroyed.  That was more comic still.  The bather cut off from his garments is a world-wide joke.  The German battery, having got the exact range, were having a systematic, Teutonic afternoon’s enjoyment.  But from another point of view the situation was desperate.  There were these poor fellows, hordes of them, in nature’s inadequate protection against the weather, shivering in the cold, with the nearest spare rag of clothing some miles away.  Boyce got them together, paraded them instantly under the shell fire, and led them at a rush into the blazing building to salve stores.  Six never came out alive.  Many were burned and wounded.  But it had to be done, or the whole crowd would have perished from exposure.  Tommy is fairly tough; but he cannot live mother-naked through a March night of driving sleet.

“No,” said Boyce, “if you suffered daily from the low cunning of Brother Bosch, you wouldn’t cry for things to be published in the newspapers.”

At the end of their visit I accompanied my guests to the hall.  Marigold escorted Mrs. Boyce to the car.  Leonard picked up his cap and cane and turned to shake hands.  I noticed that the knob of the cane was neatly cased in wash-leather.  Idly I enquired the reason.  He smiled grimly as he slipped off the cover and exposed the polished deep vermilion butt of the life-preserver which Reggie Dacre had described.

“It’s a sort of fetish I feel I must carry around with me,” he explained.  “When I’ve got it in my hand, I don’t seem to care a damn what I do.  When I haven’t, I miss it.  Remember the story of Sir Walter Scott’s boy with the butter?  Something like that, you know.  But in its bare state it’s not a pretty sight for the mother.”

“It ought to have a name,” said I.  “The poilu calls his bayonet Rosalie.”

He looked at it darkly for a moment, before refitting the wash-leather.

“I might call it The Reminder,” said he.  “Good-bye.”  And he turned quickly and strode out of the door.