It was quite true. The boy's wounds were self-inflicted. It was a case for court martial. Next day he was gone.
October 10th. It was in the midst of serving out the dinners that two friends turned up on their way home to England.
Hungry and travel-stained though they were, we were too busy to do more than hurl a frying-pan and eggs into their hands, with injunctions to help themselves until the rush was over and we could attend to them. How they admired our ward and its now stained, polished floors, for which we found a solution of brunswick black and turpentine so efficacious! The afternoon being slack, we hied into the town to pay a long promised visit to a naval friend, and were entertained right royally, enjoying to the full the childish pleasure of having to scale ungainly ladders from boat to boat, and listening to the conversation between our host and the ship's captain in a jargon edifying but utterly incomprehensible to the mere landlubber.
We wandered round the quay, along the roads on which stand well-guarded, but by no means hidden, 5-inch guns, their attendant "caterpillars," and, in the trains, loads of ammunition. As we watched cranes lifting great weapons of destruction off the boats the significance of this war of cold steel against quivering human flesh was borne upon us. We sauntered round, marvelling at the wonderful method by which, in less than a year, the British have created a whole small city out of nothing.
Gangs of khaki-clad workmen dwell here, utterly oblivious, no doubt, of the wonderful sunsets and Turneresque light effects as they work amidst the stores of rations destined daily for the trenches, or the picric acid, petrol and other explosives that lie by the sea.
My friends' enthusiastic anticipation of home was infectious, and it needed much will-power to withstand their pleadings to get leave too. And as the boat that carried them home grew into a faint speck on the horizon, involuntarily our thoughts went with them, past the brightly coloured villas, for all the world like the sugar-candy edifices of fairy-tales, to the land where nothing is changed. Yes! There are hours when one would gladly relinquish the necessities of life for a few of its luxuries. Chief and foremost of these, needless to say, would be an unlimited supply of those hot baths we were wont to accept as our birthright, and are only just beginning to value at their true worth. I wonder if anyone who has not spent a bleak winter in the jerry-built summer residences of a French watering-place, whose eyes have not been continually offended by the salmon-pink walls and hideous rococo cupids on low ceilings, can realise the true joy of living once more in a house, no matter how modest, but a house built to withstand the weather?
October 13th. The British advance on the outskirts of Hulluch—the village of Loos, the progress near Hooge, the French capture of that ghastly Souchez cemetery, their valiant fighting in Champagne, are things of the past. It is the Hohenzollern Redoubt that is on everyone's lips now, and Vermelles. Our own men—the hospital orderlies, that is to say—who spend all their spare moments at the hut, are quite worn out by this rush of work, which nevertheless seems to have put new life into them.
Many grouse at the R.A.M.C. Few people realise the deference due to those devoted men who, day and night, are working to alleviate suffering. They number amongst their ranks many well-born men, who joined that corps at the first call in the hopes of "getting out soon," and many who gave up excellent posts to enlist are undergoing undreamt-of hardships with a stoicism that is admirable.
After all, which lot is preferable? That of the man who, after running risks in the trenches for six days, finds himself in billets the succeeding week, able to enjoy his liberty with the consciousness of having earned it—or the man who has had steadily to perform the same menial jobs for fifteen unrelieved months, running no risk, it is true, save that of infection, but subject to the obloquy of those he is serving because he has never been in the trenches? As an R.A.M.C. orderly, who has made three unsuccessful attempts to transfer into a combatant unit, remarked to-day, the Base has well been described as "the place where they keep you until you are so fed up that the Front is a treat!"
A hundred temptations assail them, and men who had never before felt the least inclination towards drink find themselves drifting by degrees into those enticing-looking little French cafés not yet closed by the authorities.