Chapter Fourteen.
The Witch Calls.
“Pain is the lord of this world, nor is there any one who escapes from its net.”
Within the next few weeks many of our men came home. Not as we had cheered them forth, in a gay band:
Brilliant and gallant and brave!
—But ragged, haggard, footsore, dragged by or dragging half-starved horses; many of them with rheumatism planted for ever in their joints, and malaria staring from their eyes.
Fort George was a busy place again. Wives worn with watching and waiting in suspense, braced themselves afresh to the task of nursing sick husbands, while those who had no men-folk of their own on the spot were hastily spanned-in by the hospital sisters who had more than they could do in the over-crowded little hospital amongst the husbands and sons and lovers of women far away. Most of these were “travellers who had sold their lands to see other men’s,” as Rosalind puts it, and possessed of the accompanying qualifications—“rich eyes and empty hands!” Many of them were just members of that great Legion of the Lost ones always to be found in the advance-guard of pioneer bands—the men who have strayed far from the fold of home and love and women-folk.
“The little black sheep who have gone astray.
The damned bad sorts who have lost their way.”
The nursing to be done amongst these cases was of the most difficult kind, for there was no co-operation from the patient. Most of them didn’t care a brass button whether they recovered or not. They were tired, disappointed, blasé men, and their attitude towards life could be summed up in one brief potent phrase that was often on their lips: “Sick of it!”