The subtlest fool is the worst, and Gooja Singh’s tongue did not lack subtlety on occasion.  He made it his business to remind the squadron daily of its doubts, and I, who should have known better, laughed at some of the things he said and agreed with others.  One is the fool who speaks with him who listens.  I have never been rebuked for it by Ranjoor Singh, and more than once since that day he has seen fit to praise me; but in that hour when most he needed friends I became his half-friend, which is worse than enemy.  I never raised my voice once in defense of him in those days.

Meanwhile Ranjoor Singh grew very wise at this trench warfare, Colonel Kirby and the other British officers taking great comfort in his cunning.  It was he who led us to tie strings to the German wire entanglements, which we then jerked from our trench, causing them to lie awake and waste much ammunition.  It was he who thought of dressing turbans on the end of poles and thrusting them forward at the hour before dawn when fear and chill and darkness have done their worst work.  That started a panic that cost the Germans eighty men.

I think his leadership would have won the squadron back to love him.  I know it saved his life.  We had all heard tales of how the British soldiers in South Africa made short work of the officers they did not love, and it would have been easy to make an end of Ranjoor Singh on any dark night.  But he led too well; men were afraid to take the responsibility lest the others turn on them.  One night I overheard two troopers considering the thought, and they suspected I had overheard.  I said nothing, but they were afraid, as I knew they would be.  Has the sahib ever heard of “left-hand casualties”?  I will explain.

We Sikhs have a saying that in fear there is no wisdom.  None can be wise and afraid.  None can be afraid and wise.  The men at the front, both Indian and British-French, too, for aught I know—­who feared to fight longer in the trenches were seized in those early days with the foolish thought of inflicting some injury on themselves—­not very severe, but enough to cause a spell of absence at the base and a rest in hospital.  Folly being the substance of that idea, and most men being right-handed, such self-inflicted wounds were practically always in the hand or foot and always on the left side.  The ambulance men knew them, on the instant.

Those two fools of my squadron wounded themselves with bullets in the left hand, forgetting that their palms would be burned by the discharge.  I was sent to the rear to give evidence against them (for I saw them commit the foolishness).  The cross-examination we all three underwent was clever—­at the hands of a young British captain, who, I dare swear, was suckled by a Sikh nurse in the Punjab.  In less than thirty minutes he had the whole story out of us; and the two troopers were shot that evening for an example.

That young captain was greatly impressed with the story we had told about Ranjoor Singh, and he called me back afterward and asked me a hundred questions more—­until he must have known the very color of my entrails and I knew not which way I faced.  To all of this a senior officer of the Intelligence Department listened with both ears, and presently he and the captain talked together.