Wakeman had no reply to make to that. It is not possible with a bayonet, or even with a Lewis gun, to cause the total disappearance of an enemy’s body.
After his bath, with a clean shirt on him and a clean pair of socks, Wakeman dined. There is no lack of good food in Number 50 Convalescent Camp, and men recovering from wounds often have healthy appetites. But Wakeman ate, gorged himself, to the astonishment even of the kitchen orderlies. Plateful after plateful of stewed meat and potatoes, steaming and savoury, disappeared. Yet there was no sign about the boy of the lassitude of repletion. His eyes remained bright and glanced rapidly here and there. His body was still alert, the movements of his hands quick and decisive.
After dinner, rest. Wakeman found himself with other new-comers in a tent in the corner of the camp. The Irishman was there, still lamenting in picturesque phrases the loss of his two prisoners.
“And the biggest of them—a fine figure of a man he was—had the beautifullest helmet on him that ever was seen; worth twenty francs it was, any day, and me without a penny in my pocket. But where was it after the shell bursted? Tell me that if you can.”
The Canadian was there, patiently ready to listen to any story, having apparently no story of his own to tell. Wakeman began again.
“It was the Prussian Guard,” he said, “and we gave them proper hell, we did, out in the open. No blasted machine guns. Just them and us with the bayonet. And——”
He talked in vain. In the tent were beds, real beds with mattresses of woven wire, and palliasses stuffed with straw. Stretched flat on his back the Irishman snored. His head pillowed on his folded arm the Canadian slept peacefully, a quiet smile, like a child’s, on his face. Wakeman looked at them and snorted with contempt. For him no sleep was possible. He pulled a bench to the door of the tent, and sat in the sunshine. He found the lid of a cigarette tin and set to work to scrape the mud off his clothes and boots. But the work wearied him. With a piece of string he laced up the long rent in his trousers, cutting holes in the material with the blade of a knife. Then, still obstinately disinclined for sleep, he went out to explore the camp.
At one end of the camp is a hut, a long, low building. It is one of those canteens and recreation huts, which, working through various organizations, the public at home provides for the men in France. They are familiar enough to everyone in France, and the men know that there is a welcome for them however often they pass the doors. In this hut Mrs. Jocelyn works all day long and every day.
Sometimes she cooks, making vast puddings, stewing cauldrons full of prunes or figs. Sometimes she stands behind the counter serving bowls of tea, coffee, cocoa, lemonade, to thirsty men. Sometimes, half asphyxiated with tobacco smoke, she sits at the piano and hammers out rag-time tunes, while the men crowd round her, their faces close to her as they peer at the music, their voices threatening her with deafness when they bellow in her ears. Sometimes she sits for an hour beside some dull-eyed victim of shell shock, patiently trying to coax or trick him back to some interest in life again, giving him, literally, her own vitality, until, “virtue gone out” of her, she must seek fresh strength for herself in the less exhausting toil of a scullery maid. Thus she pays to man the debt she owes to God for the cross over the grave of one son dead, and the unconquerable spirit of the other crippled.
It was a slack hour when Private Wakeman, in his grotesquely tattered clothes, limped through the door. Only a few men were in the hut, writing or playing draughts. A boy at the piano was laboriously beating out a discordant version of “Tennessee.” Mrs. Jocelyn sat on a packing-case, a block of paper on her knee, writing a letter to a man who had left the camp to go up the line again. Another woman, a fellow worker, was arranging plates of cakes and biscuits on the counter, piling bowls ready to hand for the crowd of men who would come later, clamouring for tea.