For answer, Peter held up the staring headlines.
“Great British Victory,” they read. “Triumph of Staff Work. Hill 70 Ours. Official.”
Peter ripped the paper to shreds; flung it in the gutter.
PART EIGHTEEN
RESPITE
§ 1
Francis Gordon was not killed at the disaster of Loos. A stretcher-bearer wheeled him, unconscious of whistling shrapnel, to the casualty-clearing station at Vermelles; and thence, still unconscious, he came by Ford ambulance and Red Cross train and yet another ambulance to a great bare hospital at Rouen.
For three days he knew nothing. Life ebbed and flowed back again in waves as of morphia: pain throbbed and receded through the torn body it could not awaken. On the fourth day, very dimly, he grew conscious of his suffering self. It seemed to him that he lay in a four-poster bed, round which figures moved vaguely. He heard one of the figures speaking: “It’s time for his injection”; felt something prick his fore-arm; drowsed off again into unconsciousness.
Next morning he awoke to pain. Some one was questioning him. The some one had a board in her hand; wanted to know who he was. (For secret service men wear no “identity discs”; and Nurse Prothero had been ordered to find out the name of the patient). He told her: “Gordon, Francis, Captain, Intelligence Corps.” “Religion?” she asked. “Church of England, sister.”
The nurse, a comely middle-aged creature, smiled down at him; and he slept. But gradually, the morphia ebbed away from him. Pain called to consciousness. . . .