Henry moved in his chair.

"I often wonder," he said, "whether the thing was an inspiration of St.
Alban's that morning on the deck of the hospital transport, or had he
thought about it at some other time? Was the sentence stored in
the man's memory, or did it come with the first gleam of returning
consciousness from a soul laid open by disaster? I think racial words,
simple and unpretentious, may lies in any man close to the bone like
that to be rived out with a mortal hurt. That's what keeps me wondering
about the words he used. And he did use them.

"I don't doubt that a lot of our hero stuff has been edited after the
fact. But this sentence wasn't edited. That's what he said, precisely.
A hundred wounded soldiers on the hospital transport heard it. They were
crowding round him. And they told the story when they got ashore. The
story varied in trifling details as one would expect among so many
witnesses to a tragic event like that. But it didn't vary about what
the man said when the Hun commander was swinging his automatic pistol on
him.

"There was no opportunity to edit a brave sentence to fit the affair.
St. Alban said it. And he didn't think it up as he climbed out of the
cabin of the transport. If he had been in a condition to think, he
had enough of the devil's business to think about just then; a brave
sentence would hardly have concerned him, as I said awhile ago.

"Besides, we have his word that, after what happened in the cabin,
everything else that occurred that morning on the transport was a blank
to the man; was walled off from his consciousness, and these words were
the first impulse of one returning to a realization of events."

Sir Henry Marquis reflected.

"I think they were," he continued. "They have the mark of spontaneity;
of the first disgust of one grasping the fact that he was being
threatened."

The Baronet paused.

"The event had a great effect on England," he said. "And it helped to
restore our shattered respect for a desperate enemy. The Hun commander
didn't sink the transport, and he didn't shoot St. Alban. It's true
there was a sort of gentleman's agreement among the enemies that
hospital transports should not be sunk.

"But anything was likely to happen just then. The Hun had failed to
subjugate the world, and he was a barbarous, mad creature. England
believed that something noble in St. Alban worked the miracle.

"'You're a brave man!'

"Some persons on the transport test