‘No, sir. I ’ad ’eard the name, sir, but I can’t say I knew ’im, not personally; ’e ’ad only come to the battalion lately, sir.’

‘I see. If he had been Corporal Evans, who is missing, you could not have identified the body; but you are quite sure the body you saw was that of a corporal?’

‘Yes, sir. I noticed ’e ’ad a couple o’ stripes up. What I noticed was ’is overcoat. It were a good overcoat, nearly new; an’ I’ve been lookin’ out for a good overcoat a long while now, but I didn’t ’ave time to get it. A few shells came over, an’ Mr Sothern seemed in a ’urry like.…’

The officer looked with some severity at a face innocent of offence.

‘You don’t even know his regiment?’ he continued, interrogatively. ‘No; of course, as you say, there was no time.’

He spoke in a low even voice, almost as though preoccupied with other matters. Then he looked up again.

‘But I suppose you can describe him to some extent, can’t you, Corporal? Was he a small man? How do you think he had been killed?’

‘’e were a biggish man, sir, bigger’n I am; seemed tallish, lyin’ there, ’e were lyin’ on ’is face, an’ I could on’y see the back of ’is’ ead. I think ’e ’ad been shot.’

‘Corporal Evans was last seen the day we came up; but for all you know the man you saw might have been lyin’ there for weeks, eh?’

‘No, sir. ’e couldn’t ’ave been dead long, because the rats ’adn’t begun on ’im.’

‘Ah, I see. Rats are rather bad round here, Corporal, eh? Well, that’s all we shall ever know, I suppose. I am very sorry about Evans, they tell me he was a good man. What do you want, Bourne?’

As he turned to Bourne his manner became perceptibly colder.

‘Beg pardon, sir,’ said Sergeant-Major Tozer. ‘Just before being relieved, Corporal Jakes and Bourne were fired on by a sniper. Bourne thinks he saw him.’

Bourne was about to protest; but something in Captain Marsden’s manner prevented him. Both men felt some embarrassment on such occasions as these, for although the conventions which separated officers from men were relaxed to some extent on active service, between men of roughly the same class they tended to become more rigid. Even when momentarily alone together, they recognized, tacitly, something a little ambiguous in the relation in which they stood to each other; and with a noncommissioned officer intervening, as in the present case, the difficulty became greater. Even before the lie which rounded off Sergeant-Major Tozer’s statement so effectively had been uttered, Captain Marsden had taken up an indelible pencil from the ramshackle table, on which one of the versatile army blankets did duty as a cloth, and was contemplating the point with an air of judicial detachment.

‘Oh,’ he said crisply. ‘Did you see anything, Corporal?’

‘No, sir,’ answered Jakes; ‘but I could swear that bullet came atween us.’