- gram on its cover, and then began to tremble so that
Brand was scared.
"What is the matter?" he said.
Elsa let the cigarette-case drop on to the carpet.
"That box!" she said in an agonised voice. "Where did you find it?"
Brand remembered where he had found it, though he had not given a thought to it for more than two years. He had found it on a night in No Man's Land out by the Bois Français, near Fricourt. He had been lying out there on the lip of a mine-crater below a hummock of white chalk. Just before dawn a German patrol had crept out and he had shot at them. One man dropped quite close to where Brand lay. After an hour, when dawn came with a thick white mist rising from the moist earth, Brand crawled over to the body and cut off its shoulder-straps for identification. It was the body of a young man, almost a boy, and Brand saw, with a thrill of satisfaction (it was his "tiger" time), that he had shot him clean through the heart. A good shot in the twilight of the dawn! He thrust his hands into the man's pockets for papers, and found his pay-book and some letters, and a cigarette-case. With these he crawled back into his own trench. He remembered reading the letters. One was from the boy's sister lamenting the length of the war, describing the growing hunger of civilians in Germany and saying how she prayed every night for her brother's safety, and for peace. He had read thousands of German letters, as an Intelligence officer afterwards, but he remembered those because of the night's adventure. He had handed them over to the adjutant, for headquarters, and had kept the cigarette-case, having lost his own. It had the monogram of H. v. K. He had never thought about it from
