clumsy caution.

"Hello, Wally!" he said cheerfully. "They've pretty well chewed you up
and spit you out again, 'aven't they? But you're all right, old son,
you're going to pull through, 'cause the O.C. o' the Linseed
Lancers[Footnote: Medical Service.] here told me so. But Sister here
tells me you want to ask something about someone in the old crush." He
hesitated a moment. "I can't think who it would be," he confessed. "It
can't be his own chum, 'cause he 'stopped one,' and Wally saw it and
knew he was dead hours before. But look 'ere," he said determinedly,
"I'll go through the whole bloomin' regiment, from the O.C. down to the
cook, by name and one at a time, and you'll tip me a wink and stop me
at the right one. I'll start off with our own platoon first; that ought
to do it," he said to the Sister.

"Perhaps," she said quickly, "he wants to ask about one of his
officers. Is that it?" And she turned to him.

The eyes looked at her long and steadily, and then closed flutteringly
and hesitatingly.

"We're coming near it," she said, "although he didn't seem sure about
that 'Yes.'"

"Look 'ere," said the other, with a sudden inspiration, "there's no
good o' this 'Yes' and 'No' guessin' game; Wally and me was both in the
flag-wagging class, and we knows enough to--there you are." He broke
off in triumph and nodded to Wally's flickering eyelids, that danced
rapidly in the long and short of the Morse code.

"Y-e-s. Ac-ac-ac."[Footnote: Ac-ac-ac: three A's, denoting a full stop.
In "Signalese" similar-sounding letters are given names to avoid
confusion. A is Ac; T, Toe; D, Don; P, Pip; M, Emma, etc.]

"Yes," he said. "If you'll get a bit of paper, Sister, you can write
down the message while I spells it off. That's what you want, ain't it,
chum?"

The Sister took paper and pencil and wrote the letters one by one as
the code ticked them off and the reader called them to her.

"Ready. Begins!" Go on, Miss, write it down," as she hesitated.
"Don-I-Don--Did; W-E--we; Toc-ac-K-E--take; Toc-H-E--the;
Toc-R-E-N-C-H--trench; ac-ac-ac. Did we take the trench?"

The signaler being a very unimaginative man, possibly it might never
have occurred to him to lie, to have told anything but the blunt truth
that they did not take the trench; that the regiment had been cut to
pieces in the attempt to take it; that the further attempt of another
regiment on the same trench had been beaten back with horrible loss;
that the lines on