"I beg your pardon. One gets into a loose way of speaking. The poor bloody Huns then were dropping bombs from aeroplanes on the hospital huts. . . . I'm not suggesting they knew it was a C.C.S.; it was, no doubt, just carelessness. . . ."
"You needn't spare the Germans for me!" Sylvia said. "You needn't spare any man who has killed another man."
"I was, then, dreadfully worried," Tietjens went on. "I was composing a preface for a book on Arminianism. . . ."
"You haven't written a book!" Sylvia exclaimed eagerly, because she thought that if Tietjens took to writing a book there might be a way of his earning a living. Many people had told her that he ought to write a book.
"No, I hadn't written a book," Tietjens said, "and I didn't know what Arminianism was. . . ."
"You know perfectly well what the Arminian heresy is," Sylvia said sharply; "you explained it all to me years ago."
"Yes," Tietjens exclaimed. "Years ago I could have, but I couldn't then. I could now, but I was a little worried about it then. It's a little awkward to write a preface about a subject of which you know nothing. But it didn't seem to me to be discreditable in an army sense. . . . Still it worried me dreadfully not to know my own name. I lay and worried and worried and thought how discreditable it would appear if a nurse came along and asked me and I didn't know. Of course my name was on a luggage label tied to my collar; but I'd forgotten they did that to casualties. . . . Then a lot of people carried pieces of a nurse down the hut: the Germans' bombs had done that of course. They were still dropping about the place."
"But good heavens," Sylvia cried out, "do you mean they carried a dead nurse past you? . . ."
"The poor dear wasn't dead," Tietjens said. "I wish she had been. Her name was Beatrice Carmichael . . . the first name I learned after my collapse. She's dead now of course. . . . That seemed to wake up a fellow on the other side of the room with a lot of blood coming through the bandages on his head. . . . He rolled out of his bed and, without a word, walked across the hut and began to strangle me. . . ."
"But this isn't believable," Sylvia said. "I'm sorry, but I can't believe it. . . . You were an officer: they couldn't have carried a wounded nurse under your nose. They must have known your sister Caroline was a nurse and was killed. . . ."