He felt tired. His limbs ached from lack of sleep. When presently he emerged from the trench where his brother’s body lay, a furore of sound met his ears. Yellow smoke filled the air. There was the smell of burnt sugar, like toffee apples, which hovered wherever black powder had been expelled from the guns. It struck him that all the noise – the cries and shouts of men, the sporadic report of guns, the boom of occasional cannon fire across the ridge – must have been just as loud within the hollow as it was without; yet he had been conscious of none of it. While he had been sitting with poor Algie there seemed to have been no sound at all.

It came to him that he must now write to his father. It grieved him that the news would reach them at home before his letter could, in the lists of the wounded and the dead published in The Times and the Illustrated London News. How terrible to thus discover their poor boy’s demise! And Lord Raglan’s next despatch would likely be printed sooner than the mail could carry his missive. How his mother would greet the news he could not bear to consider. At least he would be able to say in truth that his brother had died as the direct result of wounds, while fighting alongside his company. That Algernon’s last words had demonstrated a selflessness which would surely commend him to his Maker. Gale could say, too, that the boy had died under enemy fire. Algie had been about to go back to camp after a night in the trench when a stray shell burst some way in the air and one piece came down and struck him just below the left shoulder. There had been a great deal of blood, the wound too deep to staunch the flow of it. The fellow beside him told William that Algie had surely been insensible as to the severity of his injury, for he was reported to have said: ‘If there is anyone worse hit than me, he had better be taken first,’ the lad having seen that there was only one stretcher at hand. He was not heard to speak again. During all the time it took for someone to run back to camp and fetch his brother the bleeding had gone on. By the time William arrived at his brother it had stopped.