The car left its sick men at a casualty clearing station in Charleroi. Brent had a vague impression of a great red brick building glooming up into the murk of a winter night, of boots clattering on tiled floors, of many voices, and of people who would keep moving about. He was irritable, a blazing mass of physical discomfort, slipping over the edge of sanity into delirium. Two orderlies came and carried his stretcher into a ward. He was laid on a bed, and two other orderlies started to undress him.
Brent was struggling to get at something that was buttoned up in the right breast pocket of his tunic. The orderlies were trying to remove the tunic, and Brent began to fight.
“All right, old chap, all right!”
“Here, leave that alone.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I want my money.”
“You can’t have money in hospital.”
“B——y hell,—give me——”
“Let him have it,” said the elder of the two orderlies; “let the poor blighter have it. Shove it under his pillow. All right, old chap.”
Brent calmed down like a child, but the nurse in charge had heard the scrimmage, and came sailing up in her grey dress edged with red. She was a fair-haired, hard-faced woman, with thin, clean-cut features, her eyes set too close together, and little irritable lines crimping her mouth.