The pain of the dressing forces Rees's reason to lay some claim to his arm, but when it ceases to hurt him he detaches himself from it to such a point that the ghost-arm familiar to all amputations has arrived, as it were, by mistake.
The new V.A.D. doesn't talk much at present, being shy, but to-night I can believe she will write in her diary as I wrote in mine: "My feet ache, ache, ache...." Add to that that she is hungry because she hasn't yet learnt how to break the long stretches with hurried gnawings behind a door, that she is sick because the philosophy of Rees is not yet her philosophy, that her hands and feet grow cold and her body turns to warm milk, that she longs so to sit on a bed that she can almost visualize the depression her body would make on its counterpane, and I get a glimpse of the passage of time and of the effect of custom.
With me the sickness and the hunger and the ache are barely remembered. It makes me wonder what else is left behind.... The old battle is again in my mind—the struggle to feel pain, to repel the invading familiarity.
Here they come!
One convoy last night and another this morning. There is one great burly man, a sort of bear, whose dried blood has squeezed through bandages applied in seven places, and who for all that mumbles "I'm well" if one asks him how he feels.
Long before those wounds are healed he will diagnose himself better than that!
"I'm well...." That's to say: "I'm alive, and I have reached this bed, and this bit of meat, and this pudding in a tin!" He answers by his standards.
But in a few days he will think, "I am alive, but I might be better..."; and in a few weeks, "Is this, after all, happiness?"
How they sleep, the convoy men! Watching their wounds as we dress them, almost with a grave pleasure—the passports to this wonderful sleep.