The Good Shepherd

by C.S. Forester

training no point had been more insisted on than that every wise officer kept a reserve in hand to employ at the crisis of a battle. It was an argument—the constant argument—in favor of caution.

He was a hard man, but his silence was partly due to the thought that two minutes ago, far below the Keeling, fifty men had died a horrible death; quick, but horrible. But in most part his silence was due to the unworded realization that this was a peak in his career; he had achieved the thing for which he had been trained as a fighting man for more than twenty years. He had killed his man; he had destroyed an enemy ship. He was like a student momentarily numbed at hearing he has won a prize. Yet the other realization was present equally unworded and even less conscious; fifty dead men graced his triumph.

Without his Annapolis training Krause would have grown up into a very similar man, but perhaps without the unrelenting realism that stiffened his humanity. Severe and logical discipline, grained into him, produced an odd effect when reinforcing an undeviating Christian spirit that already knew little of compromise.