By this time I had fully recovered myself and scrutinized him carefully. “You’ve got the same smile, Ned, but my how you’ve grown! You look at least two inches taller than when I saw you last.”
“And that I might,” he replied; “come on and I’ll tell ye all about it.”
So we limped into Cook’s tea rooms, secured a table in a quiet corner, and he told me his story. He spoke in a halting manner, for it brought back many of his sufferings, but to me it is so striking that I felt, in finishing the tale of my war experience, you would like to know about a war romance—for romance it surely was—with as happy an ending as any novelist might conceive. I will tell to you, as nearly as possible in his own words, the remarkable story he unfolded to me.
“Do ye mind when ye left me in the nook after bandaging my wounds?” he asked. “Weel, I lay there thinking and wondering. Ye ken, Reuter, what I was wondering about—about ye’re coming back; or maybe someone else might find me and take me back to the lines. But no help came. Then I got to thinking of the lass, and I managed to take her letters, as well as a few fags, from my haversack. I smoked the fags one after the other, and read her dear kind words over and over again. My mind kept dwelling on what was to have been our marriage day. Reuter, remember I told ye about it. It was to have been on the 7th of August, and then on account of the war, we put it off until after I should come back.
“And now, I thought to myself, maybe I’ll never get back. All sorts of possibilities passed through my mind, and between this and the awful pain that throbbed all over me, I felt like as if I’d go mad.
“It began to get dark and my patience got exhausted. Then the idea came into my head that I could maybe drag myself along with my hands a wee bit nearer our lines. I thought of your promise, Reuter, but I couldn’t stay. A few of the lads around me pegged out one after the other, and it made me feel fair frenzied.
“Do ye remember Stanley Stenning, an English fellow of C company? Weel, he crawled out a wee while before me. I’ve heard since that he was home, but minus a leg, but I haven’t heard so far of any of the other wounded fellows that were in the nook with me.
“Weel, to get back to my own experience. It was awful—the pain—it racked me through and through, as I tried to move ahead by the aid of my hands. I would take a grip on anything I could get hold of and drag myself on a wee bit at a time. I had managed to do about a hundred yards, when I seemed to sense that I had taken the wrong direction, and oh! how weak I was about that time—it’s past telling. I just simply had to lie there—I couldn’t drag myself another inch.
“I remember seeing a few bushes about fifteen yards ahead—it seemed so far!—and at first I wished I could manage to get to them, thinking I might get out of the way of the enemy, should any of them come along. But after a few minutes I decided it was perhaps as well that I was exhausted, because if I got there and should lose consciousness, ye might not find me, and that it was just as weel I was in the open. So I tried to content myself, but it was maddening.
“In dragging myself to this spot I passed here and there one of our lads—then again I would make out one of the Camerons—and Reuter, they were so—still! But I crawled on, and as the vision of the lass came to me, I felt braver, and made up my mind to hold out as long as I possibly could.