"You're not looking well," said the staff of The Muddleton Weekly Gazette sympathetically.
"No, Sir. Can't sleep, Sir. Haven't done for days till last night. I went off beautiful quite early, and then the new nurse come and woke me to give me my sleeping draught. That finished it for the night. Strange thing, sleep. There's no sense about it. Take Bill Hawkins now, a pal of mine in B Company. He was hit and took to hospital. Not serious at all. 'Me for a rest cure,' he says. But he was in that hospital for weeks and weeks, getting worse and worse; he couldn't sleep a wink. The more they drugged him, and the more sheep he counted, the more wide-awake he was. The doctors got angry and called him an obstinate case. He said it wasn't poisons but noise he needed, so they fetched an orderly and set him banging one of them frying-pan baths with a ram-rod. In five minutes Bill falls asleep as peaceful as a lamb, and the orderly, being tired, stops. Up leaps Bill, wide awake as ever, asking what's wrong. Naturally they couldn't bang a bath for him all night every night, and the house surgeon was just thinking about getting ready a slab in the mortuary, when Bill's brother, an engine-driver, comes along. He took Bill to his box just outside Charing Cross station and made up a bed for him there. Bill slept for three days solid and was about again in a week."
"Very fortunate," murmured the Gazette.
"So that time, you see, the doctors was done. But that don't often happen. There was a doctor I knew out there, name of Gordon. Young fellow he was, too, and very keen; seemed to think the War was started specially to give him surgical practice, and he loved his lancets more than his mother. He used to welcome cases with open arms, so to speak, do his very best to heal 'em quick, and weep when he succeeded. Well, he happened to be in our trench one day, showing our Sub a new case of knives, when Charlie Black was carried in on a stretcher in an awful mess.
"'I must operate at once to save your life,' he says.
"Charlie smiled as best he could and said he was agreeable.
"'But there's no anæsthetic here,' he says, 'and I can't do it without. Couldn't you do a faint for me?'
"Charlie says he's sorry, but he's never practised fetching a faint at will, like a woman can.
"'Well, then,' he says, 'you'll have to be stunned.' And he fetches a small sandbag and gives it to the stretcher-bearer.
"'Chap here,' he explains to Charlie, 'will count up slowly, and when he gets to fifty he'll hit you on the head with the sandbag and knock you out.'