“Sure!” replied Mr. Gillette. “Fine!”
“You all right, Joe?” enquired Al.
The carper made no reply, but looked about him with a dissatisfied air.
“Seems to me,” he remarked querulously, “that this War ain’t such a fierce proposition as folks made out. Look at these people all enjoying themselves.”
“Well, I guess they done their day’s work,” said Gillette pacifically. “Besides, most of them are in khaki—or else that hospital uniform”—as a string of char-à-bancs conveying convalescents to the theatre rattled cheerfully past.
But the misanthrope would not be denied.
“These here wounded don’t appear to be wounded so bad,” he grumbled. “You don’t never see no seriously wounded men in the streets of this town.”
“No,” rapped out Al Thompson, ruffled for once, “and you don’t see no dead laying around neither! I guess if you was to take a walk through a hospital, Joe McCarthy—No, you can cancel the hospital. This will do.”
They had reached Charing Cross Station. From the farther gate streamed a slow-moving procession of loaded Red Cross ambulances. Another procession, empty, was moving in at the nearer gate, to disappear inside the station. Down an adjacent street stretched a line of more ambulances, and more yet. But the busy crowd in the Strand gave little heed to the spectacle. They had witnessed it, or could have witnessed it, at this hour and in this place, among others, any evening during the past four years.