With the French at Seddel Bahr[ToList]
It must have been about nine o'clock when an orderly came around and turned out all the lights except a reading lamp over the desk where the night sister sat. All that night I could not sleep. About midnight the night sister gave me a sleeping draught, but it did no good. I was suffering the most intense pain, but I was so glad to be away from the dirt of the trenches that I felt nothing else counted. The next day I was a great deal weaker, and could scarcely talk. When the doctor came around to dress my wounds, I could only smile at him. All that day the sister came to my bed at frequent intervals. I was too weak then to eat. Two or three times she gave me some sort of broth through a little feeding bowl. In the evening I had sunk into apathy. The sister sent for the doctor. He came, felt my pulse, took my temperature, then turned and whispered to the sister. She called an orderly, and I heard her say, "Bring the screens for this man." The orderly went away and in a few minutes returned with two screens large enough to entirely conceal my bed. When the screens had been put in position, the sister came in, wiped my mouth and forehead, and went away. On the other side of the screen I heard her speaking softly to the doctor. The whole thing seemed to me something entirely apart from me. I felt that I was watching a scene in a play, and that I found it of little interest. After about an hour the doctor and the sister came in again.
"Feeling all right, old man?" said the doctor.
"Yes," I said. "Fine."
"Sister," said the doctor, "give this man anything he wants."
The sister bent over me. She was a woman between thirty and thirty-five, of the type that inspires confidence; every word and movement reflected poise, and there was a calmness and serenity about her that you knew she could have acquired only as a result of having seen and eased much human suffering.
"If there is anything you would care to have, please ask for it, and if it is at all possible we will get it for you," she said, in a softly modulated voice, with the slightest suspicion of a drawl; it was the voice of a cultivated English-woman; after the Peninsula, a woman's voice was like a tonic.
"Yes," I said, "I want chicken and wine."