The line is especially long on mornings when they know we are in for two hours of “settin’-ups” or when some especially hard detail such as camp orderly or kitchen police has been handed out. A day in the hospital will relieve one of all these duties. This morning I was on the long line. But I hasten to explain that I was sick (that’s what they all say, of course,) with chills and a scrapy feeling in my throat; and since we are forbidden to take any medicine of our own, I shame-facedly line up with the rest of them. There were about twenty all told and the doctor made short work of us.
“What’s the matter with you?” very cross.
“I-I-I-here—it hurts,” said one, pointing to his back and looking quite scared. The M. D. poked his finger into the spot designated.
“Man you’re not sick,” said the doctor in a very startling manner, “you’re almost dead, only you won’t lie down. You’ve dislocated a couple of vertibraes, ruptured a half-dozen ligaments and like as not you have a chronic case of pneumonia. The only thing that I can recommend for you is two hours of strenuous exercise. You may pull through and you may not.” Then, with a malicious grin, he turned to the next man and the first invalid shuffled off, mumbling something about horse doctors without any horse sense.
Two out of twenty of us got by. The rest went to work. I was one of the two. I had a slight temperature and an inflamed throat. Nothing serious, but report to the hospital. I did. And the best thing about the hospital was the fact that there were two sheets on the bed and I had an abbreviated flannel nightshirt to sleep in. Three big pills, the size of bullets and just as deadly, and then I turned in, went to sleep and slept right through mess time.
Four o’clock I was feeling very much better and ravenously hungry and at five o’clock I was discharged as cured. I don’t know what I was cured of, but I’m feeling much spryer just now after three helpings of beef stew and apple marmalade and I’m ready to turn in and sleep some more.
Thursday:
If there is one thing that I want to remember more than anything else about this Conscript Camp it is the spectacle I witnessed and took part in this evening.
Fancy if you can Tower Hill with its big headquarters building snuggled in among the scattered and gaunt pines, the tall, ungainly water-tank propped up on all too spindly-looking stilts. On top of this a single figure thrown in bold relief by the golden yellow light of a big watch-fire, beating time with his baton, and below him, clothing the slopes of the hill five thousand men, his chorus, thundering forth across the starlit night “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean.” That chorus was wonderful; that crowd was wonderful; everything about it was wonderful.
We were all singing; thousands of fellows in khaki, some snuggled in their big army overcoats, some puffed out like pouter pigeons with the sweaters they had piled on under their tunics against the cold chill of night. Intermingled were the lumber jacks and labourers from the civilian camp, most of them in gay mackinaws and caps; with now and then an officer immaculately clad in clean cut uniform, or a Y. M. C. A. man in grey-green suit with red circle and triangle gleaming in the firelight. And how well they could sing; I have never heard a more stirring chorus and as we raised our voices loud and clear shivery thrills raced up and down our spines, and we were stirred to the highest pitch of patriotic fervor. Indeed, there were some among us who could find no better way of expressing the emotion that swelled within save by tears. They cried. I was one of them.