Page:Lieutenant and Others (1915) by Sapper.djvu/127

 things that are not attached to him by chains.

It doesn’t sound at all romantic all this, does it?—and yet, well, I found my respirator in the pocket of another coat. And as Brown came in with some food—he’d recovered about an hour—I handed him back his respirator, and I asked him why he’d done it.

“Well, I thought as ’ow you might ’ave to be giving orders like, and would want it more than me.” He spoke quite naturally.

I didn’t thank him—I couldn’t have spoken to save my life—but the lad knew what I thought. There are some things for which thanks are an insult.

There was another thing which comes to me too, as I write—nothing very wonderful again, and yet In the course of our wanderings we were engaged upon a job of work that caused us to make nightly a pilgrimage through Wipers. At the time Wipers was not healthy. That stage of the war of attrition—I understand that many of the great thinkers call it a war of attrition, though