"Look here," he said, "I don't want to scare you, but suppose that chap's got anything infectious. Is there a doctor handy?
"Nowhere nearer than Sailly."
"Well, Gubson tells me they were expecting the M.O. at our camp today. He may have stayed the night. Can you send somebody up to see?"
I sent off an orderly at once, and in half-an-hour a young doctor arrived, and ordered all the other men out of the hut. Then he pulled a gaudy handkerchief out of his pocket, sprinkled it with some stuff out of a small phial, tied it over his mouth and only then began to fiddle about the sick man, feeling his pulse and sounding him.
Then he got up, readjusted his handkerchief-respirator and mumbled that it was cerebro-spinal-something. Spotted fever.
We all got out of that hut in double-quick time, believe me. The doctor was full of orders—half a hundred things to do at once. The man must be strictly isolated. All the contacts—every blessed man who had been in the hut with him—must be placed under supervision. The hut must be put out of bounds. And when he found half the men had gone under the tarpaulin shelter he put that out of bounds too.
We were a full hour trying to separate the contacts; but when the doctor found the cook getting breakfast ready and heard he had been in the sick man's hut he threw his hand in.
"I won't answer for a single one of you," he said; "the place is no better than a pest-house. Throw that breakfast away. It's sheer poison. Clear out, all of you."
It was Chaucer started the panic. I saw him sneaking away up the slope, so I thought it better to make a move too. I didn't ask the doctor where we were to go; he'd have had us all sleeping out on the open grass for a week if I had. So the whole lot of us, half asleep, trekked back to Ripilly village and turned into our old billets again.