“I thank you,” he said, “for myself and my people for your services. Our gratitude cannot be great enough toward men who have served us as you have.”
He spoke in a very low voice and with no assumption of royal dignity. There was nothing in the least thrilling about the incident, but there was much apparent sincerity in the few words.
After he had gone, one of the nurses asked me what he had said.
“Oh,” I said, “George asked me what I thought about the way the war was being conducted, and I said I’d drop in and talk it over with him as soon as I was well enough to be up.”
There happened one of the great disappointments of my life. She didn’t see the joke. She was English. She gasped and glared at me, and I think she went out and reported that I was delirious again.
Really, I wasn’t much impressed by the English King. He seemed a pleasant, tired little man, with a great burden to bear, and not much of an idea about how to bear it. He struck me as an individual who would conscientiously do his best in any situation, but would never do or say anything with the slightest suspicion of a punch about it. A few days after his visit to the hospital, I saw in the Official London Gazette that I had been awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal. Official letters from the Canadian headquarters amplified this information, and a notice from the British War Office informed me that the medal awaited me there. I was told the King knew that the medal had been awarded to me, when he spoke to me in the hospital. Despite glowing reports in the Kentucky press, he didn’t pin it on me. Probably he didn’t have it with him. Or, perhaps, he didn’t consider it good form to hang a D. C. M. on a suit of striped, presentation pajamas with a prevailing tone of baby blue.[A]
While I was in the King George Hospital I witnessed one of the most wonderful examples of courage and pluck I had ever seen. A young Scot, only nineteen years old, McAuley by name, had had the greater part of his face blown away. The surgeons had patched him up in some fashion, but he was horribly disfigured. He was the brightest, merriest man in the ward, always joking and never depressed. His own terrible misfortune was merely the topic for humorous comment with him. He seemed to get positive amusement out of the fact that the surgeons were always sending for him to do something more with his face. One day he was going into the operating room and a fellow patient asked him what the new operation was to be.
“Oh,” he said, “I’m going to have a cabbage put on in place of a head. It’ll grow better than the one I have now.”
Once in a fortnight he would manage to get leave to absent himself from the hospital for an hour or two. He never came back alone. It took a couple of men to bring him back. On the next morning, he would say:
“Well, it was my birthday. A man must have a few drinks on his birthday.”