Peter looked round him at the mute expressionless faces above the khaki collars. There were a few of the “old gang” still. Lodden, Conway, Purves, Pettigrew and Straker, “Brat” Archdale, (acting orderly officer, grown from blushing boy to hollow-cheeked young man), Merrilees, solemn as an owl, unaltered. . . . Eight, including himself, nine. Nine out of twenty six!
How many of those nine would be left after this new show? Eight at most! One of them was done for already; couldn’t hope to last more than a month. And that one of them was himself. . . . Still, nobody need know about that till he came out of action. . . . If he came out of action. . . .
For Peter’s cough, the cough that drove him, hacking and spitting, night after night—gum-booted, “British Warm” over his pyjamas—out of the stifling room he shared with Pettigrew into the moonlight, was not the result of over-smoking. . . . Rolleston, the kindly diffident “general practitioner” who doctored Colonel Brasenose’s Brigade, had told Peter that much; told it him unconsciously.
They had met quite by accident, that very afternoon; gone to Rolleston’s “surgery.” Peter, accepting a drink, choked over it; put his handkerchief to his mouth.
“None of my business of course,” the doctor had ventured, “but if I were you I’d consult Laurillard about that wheeze of yours. Never been gassed, have you? Slightly, I mean.”
Peter kept silence.
“Funny stuff, gas,” went on the doctor. “I had a case of it before I came out, while I was still in civilian practice. A young Canadian came to me with a frightful cough—rather like that cough of yours, by the way. I tested for tubercle, of course. Not a trace. Then he began talking about the first gas-attack; said he’d been in it. That put me on the track. . . .”
“But surely,” interrupted Peter, “after all that time. . . .”
“Oh, he wasn’t gassed, in the Army sense of the word; but there’s no doubt in my mind that a tiny molecule of chlorine must have lodged in his left lung, and started the irritation. . . .”
“Did you cure him?”