Fool that he was at sixteen, he had regarded this as monstrous injustice. And when he was at length allowed to set foot on the field, in the aftermath of the battle, he had gone out with pulse pounding, pistol cold in a sweating hand.

He and Hector had discussed it before, lying close together in a nest of spring grass under the stars, a little apart from the others. Hector had killed two men, face-to-face—God knew how many more, in the smoke of battle.

“You can’t tell, really,” Hector had explained, from the lofty heights of his four years’ advantage and his second lieutenant’s commission. “Not unless it’s face-to-face, with a bayonet, say, or your sword. Otherwise, it’s all black smoke and noise and you’ve no idea what you’re doing—you just watch your officer and run when he tells you, fire and reload—and sometimes you see a Scot go down, but you never know if it was your shot that took him. He might just have stepped in a mole hole, for all you know!”

“But you do know—when it’s close.” He had given Hector a rude nudge with his knee. “So what was it like then? Your first? Don’t dare to tell me you don’t remember!”

Hector had grabbed him and squeezed the muscle of his thigh until he squealed like a rabbit, then gathered him in close, laughing, forcing John’s face into the hollow of his shoulder.

“All right, I do remember, then. Wait, though.” He was quiet for a moment, his breath stirring John’s hair warm above the ear. It was too early in the year for midges, but the wind moved over them fresh and cool, tickling their skins with ends of waving grass.

“It was—well, it was fast. Lieutenant Bork had sent me and another fellow round a bit of copse to see if anything was doing, and I was in the lead. I heard a sort of thump and a cough behind me, and I thought Meadows—he was following me—I thought he’d stumbled. I turned to tell him to be quiet, and there he was lying on the ground, with blood all over his head, and a Scot just dropping the thumping great rock he’d hit Meadows with, and bending down to snatch his gun.

“They’re like animals, you know; all wild whiskers and dirt, generally barefoot and half-naked to boot. This one glanced up and saw me, and tried to seize the musket up and brain me, only Meadows had fallen on it, and I—well, I just screamed and lunged at him. I didn’t think a bit about it; it was just like the drills—only it felt a lot different when the bayonet went into him.”