The journey took over two days. They touched at Versailles and Le Mans, the Advanced Base, swept slowly down the broad valley of the Loire, past the busy town of Nantes, followed by the side of the estuary, oddly mixed up with the shipping, and eventually came to rest in the town of St. Nazaire, at that time the Base of the British Army.
CHAPTER XXXIII
ST. NAZAIRE
His next home was a comfortable little bed in a white-painted cubicle of a boys' school that had been turned into a Base Hospital. When at length he found himself at rest in his new bed, he sighed with contentment. Everything was so quiet, and clean, and orderly. After the dirty estaminet, and the feverish hurry of the Clearing Hospital, this was indeed Peace. They gave him real broth to drink and real chicken to eat. And that night, as he sank almost for the first time into real sleep, he felt that heaven had been achieved.
Life began to creep slowly into his paralysed limbs. With infinite labour he could force his first finger and thumb to meet and separate again. His toes wagged freely. The only fly in the ointment was that the "stuff they did their dressings with" was of a fiercer nature and hurt more than the previous ones. Also, the dressings became more frequent.
He made great friends with the Doctor and the Sisters. One of them used to talk of an old Major in his Regiment with a tenderness that led him to suspect a veiled romance. He was now growing better daily, and was assailed with the insatiable hunger that follows fever. No sooner had he bolted down one meal than he counted the hours to the next.
One day they left a meal-tray on his chest, and apparently forgot it. At the end of half-an-hour his patience abandoned him. He deliberately reached out and threw everything upon the floor. The Sister came running up to see what was the matter. He maintained a haughty silence. She picked up the aluminium plates and cups. Her starched dress crinkled.
"Oh, you naughty boy!" she said, smiling entrancingly.
There was nothing for it: he burst out laughing.