Jim and Wally

by Mary Grant Bruce

Now it was all over, and for a while, at any rate, they could forget. Jim had so managed that no shock came to them—the cheery telegram he had contrived to send before being taken to hospital had reached them two days earlier than the curt War Office intimation that both boys were suffering from gas-poisoning. Jim did not mean that they should ever know what it had meant to send it. The cavalry subaltern who had helped him along to the dressing-station had been very kind; he had contrived to hear the address, even in the choked, strangling whisper, which was all the voice the gas had left to Jim; had even suggested a wording that would tell without alarming, and had put aside almost angrily Jim’s struggle to find his money. “Don’t you worry,” he had said, “it’ll go. I’ve seen other chaps gassed, and you’ll be all right soon.” He was a cheery pink and white youngster: Jim was sorry he had not found out his name. In the hard days and nights that followed, his face hovered round his half-conscious dreams—curiously like a little lad who had fagged for him at school in Melbourne.

That was two weeks ago, and of those two weeks Mr. Linton and Norah fortunately knew little. Wally had been the worst; Jim had been dragged out of the gassed trench a few minutes earlier than his friend, and possibly to the younger boy the shock had been greater. When the first terrible paroxysms passed, he could only lie motionless, endeavouring to conjure up a faint ghost of his old smile when Jim’s anxious face peered at him from the next bed. Neither had any idea at all of how they had reached the hospital at Boulogne; all their definite memories ended abruptly when that evil-smelling green cloud had rolled like a wave above them into the trench.

Out of the first dark mist of choking suffering they had passed slowly into comparative peace, broken now and then by recurring attacks, but, by contrast, a very haven of tranquillity. They were very tired and lazy: it was heavenly to lie there, quite still, and watch the blue French sky through the window and the kind-faced nurses flitting about—each doing far too much for her strength, but always cheery. They did not want to talk—their voices had gone somewhere very far off; all they wanted was just to be quiet; not to move, not to talk, not to cough. Then, as the clean vigour of their youth reasserted itself, and strength came back to them, energy woke once more, and with it their old-time lively hatred of bed. They begged to be allowed to get up; and as their places were badly needed for men worse than they, the doctors granted their prayer—after which they would have been extremely glad to get back again, only that pride forbade their admitting it.

Moreover, there was London; and London, with all that it meant to them, was worth a struggle. Two months earlier it had bored them exceedingly, and nothing had seemed worth while, with the call in their blood to be out in the trenches. Now, after actual experience of the trenches, their ideas had undergone a violent change. The romance of war had faded utterly. The Flying Corps might retain it still—those plucky fighting men who soared and circled overhead, bright specks in the clouds and the blue sky; but to the men who grubbed underground amid discomfort, smells, and dirt, to which actual fighting came as a blessed relief, war had lost all its glamour. They wanted to see the job through. But London was coming first, and it had blossomed suddenly into a paradise.

Some of which Jim had tried to put into his shaky pencilled notes; and the certainty of their boys’ gladness to get back lay warm at the hearts of Norah and her father as they walked along Piccadilly. Spring was in the air: the Park had been full of people, the Row crowded with happy children, scurrying up and down the tan on their ponies, with decorous grooms endeavouring to keep them in sight. The window-boxes in the clubs were gay with daffodils and hyacinths: the busy, knowing London sparrows twittered noisily in the budding trees, making hurried arrangements for setting up housekeeping in the summer. Even though war raged so close to England, and its shadow lay on every hearth, nothing could quite dim the gladness of London’s awakening to the Spring.

“Those fellows all look so happy,” said Mr. Linton, indicating a motor-car crammed with wounded men in their blue hospital suits and scarlet ties. “One never sees a discontented face among them. I hope our boys will look as happy, Norah.”

“If there is any chance of looking happy, Jim and Wally will take it!” said Norah, firmly.

“I think they will,” said her father, laughing. “The difficulty is to imagine them ill.”

“Yes, isn’t it? Do you remember when those horrid Zulus battered them about so badly in Durban, how extraordinary it was to see them both in bed, looking pale?”

“Well, I think it was the first time it had occurred to either of them,” said Mr. Linton.