"When I get my eye...." he says, almost with the same longing with which he says "When I get into civies...."
Scutts is not one of those whose life is stopped; he has made plans. "When I get into civies and walk out of here...." His plans for six months' holiday "are all writ down in me notebook."
"But what shall you do, Scutts? Go to London?"
"London!... No towns fer me!"
He will not tell us what he is going to do. Secretly I believe it is something he wanted to do as a boy but thought himself a fool to carry out when he was a man: perhaps it is a sort of walking tour.
Among his eleven wounds he has two crippled arms. "I'm safe enough from death," he says (meaning France), "till it fetches me in a proper way."
Perhaps he means to live as though life were really a respite from death.
I had a day on the river yesterday.
"I seed yer with yer bit of erdy-furdy roun' yer neck an' yer little attachy-case," said Pinker.
"A nurse's life is one roun' of pleasure," said Pinker to the ward.