GOLD BRAID
In Memory of a Friend
“I THINK this was the place, Sirr,” said the Sergeant, glaring through his periscope at the German trench sixty yards away. “It was on the parapet yonder—that he died, Sirr—was it not?”
His usually loud and hearty voice was hushed to that subdued tone in which the British soldier mentions the dead, and the Captain who stood beside him wondered why it should jar so. It wasn’t as if the Sergeant didn’t feel it, he thought—disgust at pretended reverence and emotion was natural and easy to understand—but he knew there was no veil of hypocrisy in this case for his candour to penetrate and his mind to revolt at. That hushed tone was offspring partly of pity for the dead man and partly of respect for his own grief at the loss of his friend, chiefly perhaps of reverence for an experience beyond the Sergeant’s knowledge and for the human spirit which had faced it. It was his own damned fastidiousness
