If only he could get to that gun!  On the right a low hedge ran at right angles to the German trench, and making for it he took such little cover as it afforded, and ran forward as he had never run before, not even on that night of baneful memory.  His heart was thumping violently, there was a prodigious “stitch” in his side; and something warm was trickling down his forehead into his eyes and half blinding him, while in his ears the bullets buzzed like a swarm of infuriated bees.  The next moment he was up against a little knot of grey-coated figures with toy-like helmets, he heard a word that sounded like “Himmel,” and he had emptied his magazine and was savagely pointing with his bayonet, withdrawing, parrying, using the butt, his knees, his feet.  He suddenly felt very faint....

That is all that John Stokes remembers of the first battle of Ypres.  For the next thing he knew was that a voice coming from an immense distance—­just as he had once heard the voice of the dentist when he was coming to after a spell of gas—­was saying something to him as he seemed to be rising, rising, rising ever more rapidly out of unfathomable depths, and then out of a mist of darkness a window, first opaque and then translucent, framed itself before his eyes, and he was staring at the sun.  The voice, which was low and sweet—­an excellent thing in woman—­was saying, “Take this, sonny,” and the air around him was impregnated with a faint odour of iodoform.  Then he knew—­he was in hospital.

III

“Yes, a curious case,” said one officer to the other as he sat in a certain room at Headquarters, staring abstractedly at the list of Field Ambulances and of their Chaplains attached to the wall.  “A very curious case.  It reminds me of something Smith said to me about bad law making hard cases.  It was jolly lucky the findings of the Court were held up all that time.  If the C.-in-C. had confirmed them and the sentence had been promulgated, Stokes would now be doing five years at Woking.  Whereas, there he is back with his old battalion, holding a D.C.M., and not reduced by one stripe.”

“Not so curious as you think, my friend,” replied the other.  “Why, I saw forty men under arrest marching through H.Q. the other day singing—­singing, mind you.  There’s hope for a man who sings.  Of course, field punishment doesn’t matter much; it is only a matter of a few days and a spell of fatigue duty.  Though, mind you, I don’t say that cleaning out latrines isn’t pretty hard labour.  But when it comes to breaking a man with a clean record because he has fallen asleep out of sheer weariness—­well, what’s the good of throwing men like that on the scrap-heap?  Of course, you must try them, and you must sentence them, but you can give them another chance.  You know Stokes’s case fairly made us sit up, and we haven’t let the grass grow under our feet.  Look at that.”

The Judge-Advocate read the blue document that was pushed across the table:  “An Act to suspend the operation of sentences of Courts-martial.”  He studied the sections and sub-sections with the critical eye of a Parliamentary draughtsman.  “Yes,” he said, after some pertinent emendations, “it’ll do.  But the title is too long for common use at G.H.Q.”