I read this in the letter of an Army Service man printed in The Evening News. "There was a Guardsman in hospital in France with me who had eight bullets in him, besides three ugly bayonet wounds. He had the constitution of a horse, and after he had his 'rattles,' as he called the bullets, taken out he swore that he would be back before Christmas to square accounts with the Germans. All he wanted was to return to the fighting."
"He lies upon his bed of pain.
Despite of nurses deft and kind
He is unhappy; it is plain
That something weighs upon his mind.
Ask him his dearest wish to name,
And, smiling even on the rack,
He tells, without a trace of shame,
How he is anxious to get back."
In a half humorous way our soldiers took their wounds. They knew from experience, as a distinguished officer once said to me, that a battle field is a disagreeable place, but keen soldiers that they were, they thought that there was one thing worse than a battle, and that was not to be in one. Many soldiers were quite indignant at being sent home for what they called "scratches that will heal."
A sergeant was anxious to return to the war because he thought that he ought not to have been sent away from it. He was hit by five bullets, but why for this trifling matter should his colonel have ordered him out of the firing line and into an ambulance?
Men make light of wounds in arms, hands and feet. "They have just earned us a little rest. We shall soon go back to the trenches again."
A correspondent thus wrote of a second Lieutenant of the Royal Scots: "Only this morning he drew me a picture of war and its effect upon the novice. 'Imagine your chaps groaning all around you, your best pal shot through the heart at your feet; imagine the shrapnel screaming above—I was knocked down and stunned four times in a few minutes by shells exploding—imagine houses burning, women shrieking, and all about the place the mangled bodies of men and horses, and blood, blood, blood. I suppose I'm chicken-hearted, but I only left school last year.'
"'And your wound?' 'Oh, it's not much; still, I'm going home this afternoon. Never want to see any more war.'
"Two hours later I saw him leap into a train labelled ——. 'Where are you off to?' I asked. 'Back to the front. Can't bear the idea of my regiment being there and me loafing about some health resort.'"
A private of the Royal Sussex Regiment wrote this from a hospital in France: "My hand is very painful, but it will soon get better, I hope, as they want us back in the firing line, and every man away means fifty Germans kept alive and kicking."
Rifleman G. Harper wrote to his brother from a hospital at Paignton: "A bullet went through the left side of my face, struck my teeth, turned downwards, and just missed the main artery. The surgeon says I am one in a thousand to be alive, so it is better to be born lucky than rich. I don't think they will let me go out there after this, but if I get a chance I am off after their blood again."