Tasker Watkins was a 25 year old lieutenant, a bank clerk from a Welsh mining valley, and on the 16th of August 1944 near a village in Normandy he did something that reads like a film and then went home and became one of the most respected judges in Britain. His company was advancing through fields of standing corn that the Germans had booby-trapped and zeroed with machine guns. The attack was shredded. By the time it stalled, every other officer in the company was dead or down, and Watkins was the only one left, with about 30 men out of a full company, pinned in the open under fire, facing some 50 German infantry dug in ahead of them. So he attacked. He led those 30 men in a bayonet charge straight into the larger German force and all but wiped it out in hand to hand fighting in the corn. When an anti-tank gun opened up on them, Watkins personally charged it. Later, at dusk, cut off and surrounded, with the battalion pulling back and his little group in danger of being destroyed, he made the hard call to order his men to scatter into the dark, and then he personally charged and silenced a German machine gun post that was in their way, before gathering his survivors and bringing them back to safety. They gave him the Victoria Cross, the only one awarded to a Welsh regiment in the whole war. And here is the second act. Watkins went home, trained as a barrister, and rose all the way to become Lord Justice of Appeal and Deputy Chief Justice of England and Wales, one of the most senior judges in the country, and later a beloved president of the Welsh Rugby Union. A quiet man who, asked about the charge in the cornfield, tended to change the subject. He died in 2007, valley boy, war hero, and law lord.