I cannot imagine how that poor soldier must have felt, what with who Hitler became.
Tandey was haunted the remainder of his life by his good deed, the simple squeeze of a trigger would have spared the world a catastrophe which cost tens of millions of lives. He was living in Coventry when the Luftwaffe destroyed the city in 1940, sheltered in a doorway as the building he was in crumbled and city burned like a scene from Dante's Inferno.
He was also in London during the Blitz and experienced that atrocity first hand, he told a journalist in 1940, "if only I had known what he would turn out to be. When I saw all the people, woman and children he had killed and wounded I was sorry to God I let him go".
When war erupted the 49 year old tried to rejoin his regiment to see to it that, "he didn't escape a second time", but failed the physical due to wounds received at the Battle of the Somme.