e 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'