On the 20th of March, Chicksands, who had been obliged to go back to his work, came down again for the night.  Desmond lay waiting for him, and Arthur saw at once that death was much nearer.  But the boy had himself insisted on strychnine and morphia before the visit, and talked a great deal.

The military news, however, that Chicksands brought him disappointed him greatly.

’Not yet?’—­he said miserably—­’not yet?’—­breathing his life into the words, when Chicksands read him a letter from a staff officer in the Intelligence Department describing the enormous German preparations for the offensive, but expressing the view—­’It may be some days more before they risk it!’

‘I shall be gone before they begin!’ he said, and lay sombre and frowning on his pillows, till Chicksands had beguiled him by some letters from men in Desmond’s own division which he had taken special trouble to collect for him.

And when the boy’s mood and look were calmer, Arthur bent over him and gave him, with a voice that must shake, the news of his Military Cross—­for ‘brilliant leadership and conspicuous courage’ in the bit of ‘observation work’ that had cost him his life.

Desmond listened with utter incredulity and astonishment.

‘It’s not me!’—­he protested faintly—­’it’s a mistake!’

Chicksands produced the General’s letter—­the Cross itself.  Desmond looked at it with unwilling eyes.

’I call it silly—­perfectly silly!  Why, there were fellows that deserved it ten times more than I did!’

And he asked that it should be put away, and did not speak of it again.

In all his talk with him that night, the elder officer was tragically struck by the boy’s growth in intelligence.  Just as death was claiming it, the young mind had broadened and deepened—­had become the mind of a man.  And in the vigil which he kept during part of that night with Martin, the able young surgeon who had brought Desmond home, and was spending his own hard-earned leave in easing the boy’s death, Chicksands found that Martin’s impression was the same as his own.

’It’s wonderful how he’s grown and thought since he’s been out there.  But do we ever consider—­do we ever realize—­enough!—­what a marvellous thing it is that young men—­boys—­like Desmond—­should be able to live, day after day, face to face with death—­consciously and voluntarily—­and get quite used to it?  Which of us before the war had ever been in real physical danger—­danger of violent death?—­and that not for a few minutes—­but for days, hours, weeks?  It seems to make men over again—­to create a new type—­by the hundred thousand.  And to some men it is an extraordinary intoxication—­this conscious and deliberate acceptance—­defiance!—­of death—­for a cause—­for their country.  It sets them free from themselves.  It matures them, all in a moment—­as though the bud and the flower came together.  Oh, of course, there are those it brutalizes—­and there are those it stuns.  But Desmond was one of the chosen.’