"'How am I to get out?' I asked. 'The same way you got in,' he says, very short. 'And where am I to go?' And I wouldn't like to tell you where he told me to go to.
"Well, I stooped and went back along the communication trench. I wasn't going to draw the fire on the boys who were in the firing line. But when I got to the end of it, I stood up, and put my fingers in my mouth and I whistled as loud as I could. I couldn't shoot at the Germans, but I did want a bit of fighting. I put my hands in my pockets and strolled back over that ground where we'd been crawling; and I whistled 'The Wild Colonial Boy'. Nobody took a bit of notice.
"I slept in the billet that night, and had a real good breakfast; then the wounded began to come in. There was a pretty lively scrap through the night; of course I slept through it all—just my luck. I made myself useful—stretcher-bearing and what not. But I could see that if I stayed there, I'd only get myself into trouble, and somebody else, too, very likely.
"I went to the little base hospital, and I said, 'Can you give me an eyeshade. My eye is paining me.' And they gave me this. They were just making up a hospital train for the coast, so I chucked away my glass eye—I was disgusted with it anyhow—and put on the shade. Then I got on the train as one of the poor wounded.
"Presently another doctor comes round—this place seems stiff with doctors—and examined me. 'That's getting on nicely,' he says, looking very hard at me. 'Yes, doctor,' I says, as if I was in pain. Of course he must have seen there was something wrong, but he was too busy to worry about a little thing like that.
"We had a pleasant journey down: nurses fussing around, and so on. And what do you think I struck on the ship? 'Another blooming doctor!' (unconsciously quoting Kipling).
"He was so pleased with my quick recovery that he brought an assistant to look at me. They seemed quite dazed about it, but they were busy men: plenty to keep them occupied without troubling about me, which is just as it should be.
"I got my cap at Southampton, and joined up with my old corps. No fighting for me.
"Now I've got to send in my papers. But I've not come 12,000 miles for a fight with the Germans to go home without firing a shot. I'm getting a new eye made here in London; I've seen it in the rough and it's a boshter, the real thing. They know how to make them here.