And quite as remarkable was the repair of my broken jaw, the extraordinary skill of dentistry by which the broken teeth were re-made, the jaw itself braced and placed firm by golden bands. When the work was completed I was overjoyed to find that I could articulate without the slightest impediment and masticate as thoroughly and easily as ever I could. For a long time, however, I was restricted to mere liquid food, feeding out of a tube as if David Fallon were thirty weeks instead of thirty years old.
From the hospital where the operation on my arm had been performed I was taken in company with scores of other injured in a battalion of motor cars to a train at Albert whence we traveled to Rouen, where I remained for several weeks at No. 8 General Hospital and where my attending physician was Capt. Page, and my nurse, Miss Templey, a cousin of Maj. Templey, all of whom I had known in India.
I was quickly recovering my strength and was finally sent aboard the Caledonia for the trip to Southampton. They had spotless, clean bunks for us and scores of charming young women—young college women, who had left their studies to serve in the Volunteer Aid Detachment. Imagine the peace and pleasure for men who were just returning from hell to have such companionship, to listen to songs beautiful and soft, where they had been listening to the scream of shells, to hear voices sweet and gentle where they had been for months hearing only the sharp moans of the wounded or the raucous voices of authority raised in deadly emergencies! Talk of Nirvana at its best! This was something better!
Arrangements for our reception at Southampton were as smoothly efficient and kindly as had been our transportation and treatment in France. Individually, good fortune was attending every little distance in my journey. Taken to London I found myself billeted in the home of Lady Carnarvon in Bryanston Square. She had turned her beautiful residence into a hospital and there I was quartered in a spacious apartment with Lieutenant McDonald of a Lancashire regiment who had a smashed leg and Capt. Fred Monk, M. C., who had also a smashed leg and lost an arm.
But he was very cheerful regarding the situation and so was McDonald. On the train for the wounded and also aboard the Caledonia you hardly heard any talk of war. Everybody was sick of it. They wanted to talk about anything but war. But here at Lady Carnarvon’s in the days that followed, naturally our memories came crowding back. And we went over our hardships, the thrills we had experienced and then inevitably the panorama would sweep our vision of the sections of No Man’s Land we had seen with its piled and distorted dead and one of us without feeling the necessity of telling the others of what he was thinking would as inevitably say:
“Well, we are very lucky beggars after all.”
These would usually be the thoughts in the twilight hour and then in would walk our smiling rosy-cheeked Irish tease of a nurse, Miss Anne O’Laughlin—all the nurses at Lady Carnarvon’s were Irish and therefore for me the more charming—preceding an orderly with tea things. She’d sit and smile and jest and make an hour or more dash by so pleasantly that—well, we very well knew at those times that we were very lucky beggars indeed.
Then when I was on my feet, I was sent to Lady Furness’ hospital at Harrowgate and there I spent a delightful convalescence and there it was that I received the despatch from the Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty to appear at Buckingham Palace for decoration.
Col. Holland, D. S. O., of the Indian Army, commandant at Lady Furness’ hospital, personally brought me the despatch and seemed as proud of it as I was, for I had been one of his youngsters in the ranks in India.
