HOMEWARD BOUND
As soon as Hoddinott and Pike had left me, two other stretcher bearers
carried me about two hundred yards farther to a rough shelter made of
poles laid across supports composed of sandbags. This was the dressing
station. On top of the poles, sandbags made it impervious to overhead
shelling. On three sides it was closed in, but the side nearest the
beach was open. From where my stretcher was placed I could just catch
a glimpse of the AEgean Sea and of the ships. Men on stretchers were
lined up in rows on the ground. Here and there a man groaned, but most
of the men were gazing at the roof, with set faces. Some who were only
slightly wounded were sitting up on stretchers while Red Cross men
bandaged up their legs or feet. A doctor was working away methodically
and rapidly. A little to the right another shelter housed the men who
were being sent to hospital with dysentery, enteric, or typhoid. As
soon as I was brought in, the doctor came to me. "I'll do this one
right away," he said to one of his assistants. The assistant stripped
the blanket from me and cut off the portions of the blood-stained
shirt still remaining. As he did so, something dropped on the ground.
The Red Cross man picked it up.
"Here's the bullet that hit you," he said, putting it beside me on the
stretcher. "It dropped out of your shirt. It just got through you and
stuck in your shirtsleeve."
"You'd better get him a little bag to keep his things in," said the
doctor.
The Red Cross man produced a bag, took my pay book, and everything he
found in my pocket, and put them in it, then tied them to the
stretcher. By this time I was ready for the doctor to begin work. That
doctor knew his business. In a very few minutes he had probed and cut
and cleaned the wound, and adjusted a new bandage. The bleeding had
stopped by this time. He asked me the circumstances of being hit. He
told me to grip his hand and squeeze. I tried it with my right hand
but could do nothing; then I tried the left hand and succeeded a
little better. The doctor looked grave when I failed to grip with my
right hand, but brightened a little when I gripped with my left. All
the time he talked to me genially. That did me nearly as much good as
the surgical attention he gave me. He was a Canadian, he told me. At
the outbreak of the war he had been taking post-graduate courses at
Cambridge University in England. The University sent several hospital
units to the front, and he had come with this one. He knew Canada and
the States pretty thoroughly.
"Where do you come from?" he asked me.
"Newfoundland," I told him. "But I live in the United States."
"What part?" he asked.
"Cambridge, Massachusetts," I told him.
"Oh," he said, "that's where Harvard University is."
"Yes," I said, "I was a student there when I enlisted."
The doctor called to a couple of the Red Cross men. "Here's a chap
from Harvard University in Cambridge, over in the United States." The
two Red Cross men came and told me they were students at Cambridge.
They talked to me for quite a little while. Before they left me to
attend to some more wounded, they made me promise to ask to be sent to
Cambridge, England, to hospital. The University had established a very
large and thoroughly equipped hospital there. All I had to do, they
said, was tell the people that I had been a student at the other
Cambridge, and I should be an honored guest. They persisted in calling
Harvard, Cambridge, and when they went away said that they were
overjoyed to have seen a man from the sister university.
The doctor came back in a few minutes.
"How are you feeling now?" he said.
"I feel pretty well now," I answered, "but it's very close in here
with all these wounded men, and the place smells of chloroform. Can't
I be moved outside?"
"I'll move you outside if you say so," said the doctor, "but you're
taking a chance. Occasionally a stray shell comes over this way. The
Turks are trying to locate a battery close to this place. Sometimes a
shell bursts prematurely, and drops around here."
On the Peninsula, officers who gave men leave to go on dangerous
missions salved their consciences by first warning the men that in
doing it "they were taking a chance." The caution had come to mean
nothing.
"All right, doctor," I said. "I'll take a chance."
Two stretcher bearers came, and lifted me outside the shelter, where
the wind blew, fresh and invigorating. Just as they turned, I heard
the old familiar shriek that signaled the coming of a shell. It burst
almost overhead. Most of the missiles it contained dropped on the
other side of the shelter, but a few tiny pieces flew in my direction.
Three of them hit me in the right arm, a fourth landed in my leg.
"Is anybody hit?" yelled a Red Cross man, whose accent proclaimed him
as an inhabitant of the country north of the Clyde.
"I've got a couple of splinters," I said.
I was lifted inside quickly. The Scotchman who put on some bandages on
the little cuts looked at me accusingly.
"Ye were warned, before ye went," he said. "Ye desairved it. But
then," he added, "ye might hae got it worse. Ye're lucky ye did not
get it in the guts."
After a little while my arms and back began to ache violently. Two
Red Cross men came along and moved me to another shelter similar to
the first. This was the clearing station. From here motor ambulances
carried the wounded to the shore. I knew from the burring speech of
the big sergeant in charge that he hailed from Scotland. I asked him
where he came from, and he told me that he came from Inverness.
"Our regiment trained near there for a while," I said. "They
garrisoned Fort George."
"Ye'll no' be meanin' the Seaforth Highlanders, laddie," said he.
"No," I said, "we're Newfoundlanders, the First Newfoundland
Regiment."
"Oh, I ken ye well, noo," he said, gloomily. "Ye're a bad lot; it took
six policemen to arrest one o' your mob. On the Peninsula they call ye
the Never Failing Little Darlings." After that he thawed quite a
little. "I'll look at your wound noo, laddie," he said, after a few
minutes. "Ye're awfu' light, laddie," he said as he raised me. "Puir
laddie," he added, pityingly. "Puir laddie. Ye're stairved. I'll get
ye Queen Mary's ration."
"What's Queen Mary's ration?" I asked.
"'T's Queen Mary's gift to the wounded. I'll get it for ye right
away." He went outside the clearing station and returned in a few
minutes with a cup of warm malted milk. "'T will help ye some till ye
get aboard the hospital ship. Here's the ambulance noo."
A fleet of motor ambulances swayed over the uneven ground and rolled
up close to the clearing station. The drivers and helpers began
loading the stretchers aboard and one by one started away. Before I
was put into one, the big Scotchman took a large syringe and injected
a strong dose of morphia into my chest.
"Ye'll find it hard," he said, "bumping over the hill, but ye'll soon
be all right and comfortable."
"Tell me," I said, "shall I get into a real bed on the ship?"
He laughed. "Sure ye will, laddie. The best bed ye've had since ye've
been in the airmy. Good luck to ye, laddie."
Each of the motor ambulances carried four men, two above and two
below. I was put on top, and the door flap pulled over. We jolted and
pitched and swayed. Once we turned short and skidded at a curve. I
knew just the very place, although it was dark in the ambulance. I
had gone over the road often with ration parties. Fortunately the
morphia was beginning to take effect, and dulled the pain to some
extent. At last the ambulance stopped, somebody pulled the curtain
back, and we were lifted out. We were on West Beach. A pier ran out
into the sea. A man-o'-war launch towing a string of boats glided in
near enough to let her first boat come close to the pier. The breeze
was quite fresh, and made me shiver. The stretchers were laid across
the boats, close to each other. Soon all the boats were filled. I
could see the man on the stretcher to the right of me, but the one on
the other side I could not see. I tried to turn my head but could not.
The eyes of the man next me were large with pain. I smiled at him, but
instead of smiling back at me, his lip curled resentfully, and he
turned over on his side so that he could face away from me. As he did,
the blanket slipped from his shoulder, and I saw on his shoulder strap
the star of a second lieutenant. I had committed the unpardonable sin.
I had smiled at an officer as if I had been an equal, forgetting that
he was not made of common clay. Once after that, when he turned his
head, his eyes met mine disdainfully. That time I did not smile. I
have often laughed at the incident since, but there on that boat I was
boiling with rage. Not a word had passed between us, but his
expression in turning away had been eloquent. I cursed him and the
system that produced him, and swore that never again would I put on a
uniform. Gradually I calmed down; the morphia had got in its work. In
a little while I had sunk into a comatose condition. I remember, in a
hazy sort of way, being taken aboard a large lighter. There were tiers
of stretchers on both sides. This time I was in the lower tier, and
was wondering how soon the man above me would fall on me. At last I
went to sleep. When I awoke, I was alone and in mid-air. All about me
was black. By that time I was completely paralyzed from the waist up.
I could see only directly above my head. It was night, and the sky was
dotted with twinkling stars. I could feel no movement, but the stars
came slowly nearer and nearer. "What was I doing here in mid-air?"
Subconsciously I thought of the body of Mohammed, suspended between
earth and heaven. Now I felt I had hit on the answer. I was going to
heaven, and the thought was very comforting. Suddenly the stars
stopped, and after a pause began receding. A face appeared above me,
then the head and shoulders of a man dressed in the uniform of a naval
officer. This suggested something else to me. The officers of the
Flying Corps wear naval uniforms. I decided that while I was asleep I
had been transferred to the Flying Corps.
"Hello, old chap," said the naval officer. "Do you know where you
are?"
"No," I said. "Am I going to heaven, or have I joined the Flying
Corps?"
"No," said the officer. "You're on the stretcher being hoisted aboard
the hospital ship."
Two big, strapping, bronzed sailors approached and lifted the
stretcher on to an elevator; they stepped on and the elevator
descended. We stopped at the end of a short white-walled passageway,
lighted by electricity. The sailors grasped the stretcher as lightly
as if it had been empty, walked along to the end of the passageway
into a ward. It had formerly been a dining saloon. Large square
windows looked out upon the sea, everything was white and clean and
orderly. After the dirt and filth of the Peninsula it was like a
beautiful dream. The sailors lifted me gently into a bed and stood
there waiting for orders from the nurse. As I looked at them I thought
of our boys standing in the trenches during a bombardment and yelling,
"Come on, the navy," and I murmured, "Come on, the navy;" and then
when I looked at the calm, self-possessed, capable-looking nursing
sister, moving about amongst the wounded, I said, and never had it
meant so much to me, "Good old Britain."
The string of boats in which I had come was the batch that filled the
quota of the patients of the hospital ship. In about half an hour she
began to move. An orderly came around with meals. The doctor came in
after a little while and began examining the patients. From some part
of the ship not far from where I was came the sound of voices singing
hymns. It was the last touch needed to emphasize the difference
between the hospital ship and the Peninsula. Sunday evening on the
Peninsula had meant no more than any other. The ship moved along so
quietly that she seemed scarcely to stir. The doctor and the nurse
worked noiselessly; over everything hung the spirit of Sabbath calm.
Gallipoli might have been as far away as Mars.
[Illustration: With the French at Seddel Bahr]
It must have been about nine o'clock when an orderly came around
and turned out all the lights except a reading lamp over the desk
where the night sister sat. All that night I could not sleep. About
midnight the night sister gave me a sleeping draught, but it did no
good. I was suffering the most intense pain, but I was so glad to be
away from the dirt of the trenches that I felt nothing else counted.
The next day I was a great deal weaker, and could scarcely talk. When
the doctor came around to dress my wounds, I could only smile at him.
All that day the sister came to my bed at frequent intervals. I was
too weak then to eat. Two or three times she gave me some sort of
broth through a little feeding bowl. In the evening I had sunk into
apathy. The sister sent for the doctor. He came, felt my pulse, took
my temperature, then turned and whispered to the sister. She called an
orderly, and I heard her say, "Bring the screens for this man." The
orderly went away and in a few minutes returned with two screens large
enough to entirely conceal my bed. When the screens had been put in
position, the sister came in, wiped my mouth and forehead, and went
away. On the other side of the screen I heard her speaking softly to
the doctor. The whole thing seemed to me something entirely apart
from me. I felt that I was watching a scene in a play, and that I
found it of little interest. After about an hour the doctor and the
sister came in again.
"Feeling all right, old man?" said the doctor.
"Yes," I said. "Fine."
"Sister," said the doctor, "give this man anything he wants."
The sister bent over me. She was a woman between thirty and
thirty-five, of the type that inspires confidence; every word and
movement reflected poise, and there was a calmness and serenity about
her that you knew she could have acquired only as a result of having
seen and eased much human suffering.
"If there is anything you would care to have, please ask for it, and
if it is at all possible we will get it for you," she said, in a
softly modulated voice, with the slightest suspicion of a drawl; it
was the voice of a cultivated English-woman; after the Peninsula, a
woman's voice was like a tonic.
"Yes," I said, "I want chicken and wine."
I had not the slightest desire for chicken and wine just then, but I
felt that I had to ask for something, and the best I could think of
was chicken and wine. She smiled at me, went away, and in about
fifteen minutes she returned with a little tray. She had brought the
chicken and wine. She had minced up the chicken, and she fed me little
pieces of it with a spoon. In a little cup with a spout she had the
wine. When I had eaten a little of the chicken, she put the spout
between my lips; I had expected some port wine, but when I tasted, it
was champagne. I drank it to the very last drop.
"How do you feel now?" said the sister.
"Never felt better," I answered.
"That's very nice," she said. "I hope you'll get to sleep soon."
Then she went away, and in a few minutes the night sister came on. She
peeped in at me, smiled, and went away. All that night I looked up at
a tiny spot on the ceiling. In the board directly above my eyes, there
was a curious knot. A little flaw ran across the center of it. It
reminded me of a postman carrying his bag of letters. It seemed to me
that night that I could stand the pain no longer. My back seemed to be
tearing apart, as if a man was pulling on each shoulder, trying to
separate them from the spine. I tried to jump up from the bed but
could not move a muscle. I felt that it would be better to tear my
back apart myself at once and have it over, but when I tried to move
my arms I found them useless. It must have been well into the morning
when the night sister came around again. The doctor was with her. He
had a large syringe in his hand. He said nothing. Neither did I. I
closed my eyes. I wanted to be alone. I felt him open my shirt at the
neck and rub some liquid on my chest. I opened my eyes. He was putting
the needle of the long-syringe into my chest where he had rubbed it
with iodine. The skin was leathery and at first the needle would not
penetrate. At last it went in with a rush. It seemed at least a foot
long. He rubbed another spot, and plunged the needle in a second time.
"We've got to get him asleep," he said to the night sister. "If he's
not asleep in an hour, call me again." Very soon a drowsiness crept
over me. Nothing seemed to matter. I wanted to rest. In a short time I
was asleep. When I woke, it was broad daylight. The day sister was
standing by my bed, smiling. She turned around and beckoned to some
one. The doctor came close to the bed, felt my pulse, took my
temperature again, and smiled. "Quite all right, sister," he said.
An orderly came in, lifted me up in bed, washed my face and hands, and
brought in a tray with chicken. There was the same little feeding cup.
This time it had port wine in it. The orderly propped me up in bed,
putting cushions carefully behind my back and shoulders. The sister
and the doctor superintended while he was doing it. Lifting a wounded
man is a science. An unskilful person, no matter how well intentioned,
may sometimes do incalculable damage. Putting a strain on the wrong
muscle may undo the work of the doctor. I could see out one of the
large windows now, and I noticed that we were passing a good many
ships, mostly vessels of war. They seemed to increase in number every
few minutes; and by the time I had finished breakfast, we were in the
midst of a forest of funnels and rigging. Soon the engines stopped.
When the doctor came around to dress my back, I asked him where we
were.
"We're in Alexandria, now," he said. "In an hour's time we'll have
unloaded. You're the last patient to be dressed. We're doing you last
so that you won't have so long to wait before the bandages are
changed."
"Doctor," I asked, "how long will it be before this wound gets
better?"
"I don't know," he said. "It's impossible to tell until you've been
X-rayed. Last night we were certain you were dying, but this morning
you are perfectly normal."
In a short time the ward filled with men from the shore, landing
officers, orderlies with messages, sergeants in charge of ambulance
corps, and an army of stretcher bearers. The orderlies of the hospital
ship began putting out the kits of the wounded at the foot of their
beds. The disembarkation began as soon as the doctor had completed his
dressing. I was propped up in bed, and could see a long line of motor
ambulances on the pier. The less seriously wounded cases were taken
off first. The sister told me that these were going by train to Cairo.
Those who could not stand the train journey were going to different
hospitals in Alexandria. I was to go to Alexandria, she said. A
middle-aged man passed us on a stretcher. He was hit in the leg, and
sat on the stretcher, smiling contentedly, and looking about him
interestedly. When he saw the sister, his eyes lighted up.
"Good-by, sister," he shouted. "I'll see you again, the next time I'm
wounded."
The sister returned his good-by. Then she turned to me, and said:
"That man was on the hospital train that left Antwerp the day the
Germans shelled it in 1914. When he came in the other night I didn't
recognize him, but he remembered me."
While I waited for my turn the sister told me that she had been in the
first batch of nurses to cross the Channel at the beginning of the
war. She had been in the hospitals in Belgium that were shelled by the
Germans. At eight o'clock in the morning she had left Antwerp on the
last hospital train, and at nine o'clock the Germans occupied the
town. She had been on different hospital ships and trains ever since.
Once only had she had a rest. That was some time in the summer of
1915. She expected a week off in London at Christmas, when the ship
she was now attached to laid up for repairs. The boat I was on, she
said, carried ordinarily seven hundred and fifty wounded. At present
she carried nine hundred. They generally arrived in Suvla Bay in the
morning, and left that night, filled with wounded. At the time of the
first landing at Anzac an hour after the assault began they left with
twelve hundred wounded Australians. The sisters were sent out from a
central depot in England, and went to the various fronts. When the
stretcher bearers came to take me away, the sister gathered up my
belongings in a little bag, tied it to the stretcher, put a pillow
under my head, and nodded a bright good-by.
[Illustration: Underwood & Underwood, N.Y.
Where troops landed in Dardanelles showing Fort Sed-ne-behi
battered to pieces by Allied Fleet]
The stretcher bearers, two stalwart Australians, took me to the
elevator, across the deck, and out onto the pier. It was now getting
toward evening. A lady stopped the stretcher between the pier and the
ambulance, and handed one of the bearers a little white packet
containing a towel, soap, tooth-brush and tooth-powder. Without
waiting to be thanked she went on to intercept another stretcher. The
stretcher bearer put the package under my pillow. "Ready, Bill," said
one of the bearers with the nasal twang of the Bushman. "Lift away,"
said Bill, and they lifted the stretcher up on the top tier of the
ambulance wagon, without stepping up from the ground. They did it with
the same motion as when two men swing a bag of grain. But it was
not in the least uncomfortable for me. These Australian stretcher
bearers who meet the incoming hospital ships are amazingly strong.
There is an easy gracefulness in the way they swing along with a
stretcher that makes you trust them. I was the last man to go in that
ambulance wagon, and in a few minutes we were whirling smoothly along
good roads amid the familiar smells of Egyptian bazaars. This
ambulance drive was a good deal different from the one on the
Peninsula just after I had been wounded. After about half an hour the
ambulance swerved off the smooth asphalt road onto a gravel road,
slowed down, and ran into a yard. The Australians reappeared, opened
the flaps, and began unloading. We were in the square of a large
hospital. All around us were buildings. A fine-looking, bronzed man,
with the uniform of a colonel, was directing some Sikhs who were
carrying the stretchers from the ambulances into the different
buildings. All the stretchers were lying on the ground in a long row.
As soon as each one was inspected by the colonel, he told the
stretcher bearers where to take it. When he came to mine, he said,
"Dangerously wounded, Ward three." Then, to the stretcher bearers,
"Careful, very careful."
Ward three was a long ward with stone floor and plaster walls; it
contained about fifty beds. More than half of the beds had little
"cradles" at the foot; when I came to know hospitals, I learned that
these were to prevent the bedclothes from irritating wounded legs. In
a few minutes a doctor came around, gave orders, and the night sister
began bandaging up the wounds of the men who had come in. The sister
who arranged my bandages was Scotch, and the burr of her speech was
pleasant in my ears. She came back about ten o'clock and gave me a
sleeping potion. The change from the hospital ship must have been too
much excitement for me, because I could not get asleep that night. But
I did not feel as I had felt on the hospital ship. I have very seldom
experienced such joy as I did that night when I found that I could
move my head. I did it very slowly, and with great pain, and rested a
long time before I tried to turn it back again. The door was right
opposite my bed. I could see the sand shining white in the moonlight
in the square, and right ahead of me a large marquee where, I found
out later, some of the convalescent men slept. A man about four beds
away from mine was dying. When I had first come in he had been
groaning at intervals, but now he was silent. About one or two o'clock
an orderly came running softly in rubber-soled shoes to tell the
sister that the man had died. Half an hour later two men with a
particularly long stretcher, appeared in the ward. They stepped
quietly, trying not to disturb the sleepers. I saw them walk along to
the bed of the dead man, and go in behind the screen. After a little
while the ward orderly moved the screens back, and the stretcher
bearers reappeared. Over the burden on the stretcher was draped a
Union Jack. Often after that while I was in Ward three I saw the same
soft-stepping men come in at night and depart silently with the
flag-draped stretcher. Many of the wounded left the ward in that way,
but their places were soon filled by incoming wounded.
The first morning I was in Ward three the doctor ordered me to be
X-rayed. The X-ray apparatus was in another building. To get to it I
had to pass through the square. The sun was too hot in the morning for
us to cross the square. We therefore skirted it under the shade of
the long portico that runs along the outside of nearly all buildings
in Egypt. In beds outside the building were men with dysentery. At the
corner of the square a plank gangway led to the quarters of the
enteric patients. Just before I reached the X-ray room, a man hailed
me from one of the beds. It was Tom Smythe, a boy I had known since I
was able to walk. All the time I had been on the Peninsula I had not
seen him, nor had I heard any news of him. On the way back from the
X-ray room, the stretcher bearers stopped near his bed while I talked
with him. He had been in the hospital about two weeks, he said, and
hoped to get to England on the next boat. He promised to come to see
me in my ward as soon as he was allowed up. The next day he came,
although he was not supposed to be up, and brought with him a chap
named Varney. Varney had been in the section next mine at Stob's Camp
in Scotland, he told me. Smythe and Varney vied with each other after
that in trying to make me comfortable. To me that has always been the
most remarkable thing about our regiment: their loyalty to a comrade
in trouble. I have known Newfoundlanders to fight with each other,
using every weapon from profanity to tent mallets while in camp; on
the Peninsula I have seen these same men carrying each other's packs,
digging dugouts, and taking the other man's fatigue work. Varney was
very much distressed to see the condition I was in. He knew I was fond
of reading, and searched all over the place for books and magazines.
Once he brought me three American magazines, one _Saturday Evening
Post_ and two _Munsey's_. They were nearly two years old, but I read
them as eagerly as if they had just been published.
During the six weeks I was in hospital in Alexandria, I improved
wonderfully. The doctor in charge of the ward took a special interest
in my progress, and seemed to pride himself on having handled the case
successfully. Every day or so he brought in a doctor from some other
ward to show him my wounds and the X-ray plates. He was very careful
and tried in dressing to cause me as little pain as possible. "Poor
old chap," he would say, when he saw me wince, "poor old chap." I
think there was a great deal of psychology in my getting well. In this
Twenty-first General Hospital nothing was omitted that could make one
comfortable. Every morning an orderly washed me. The orderlies were
all very considerate, except one. He did not last very long in our
ward. He began washing the patients at four o'clock in the morning. He
always made me think of a hostler washing a carriage. When he had
washed my arms he always let them drop in a way that reminded me of
the shafts of a wagon. He was soon replaced by a chap who did not
begin his work until seven. At eight we had breakfast: fruit, cereal,
and eggs. At eleven we had soda water and crackers or sweet biscuits.
At one came dinner: soup, chicken, and vegetables, half a chicken to
each man, with a dessert of pudding or custard. At four we had tea,
with fish, and at eight came supper: cocoa and bread and butter, with
jelly. In the morning visitors came in and brought us the daily
papers. Sisters of the V.A.D.--Voluntary Aid Detachment--came in each
afternoon to relieve the regular nursing sisters. They were mostly
Englishwomen resident in Egypt. Most of their men folks were at one of
the fronts. They read to the men who could not hold books in their
hands, talked to us cheerfully, and wrote letters for us. Some of them
brought us little delicacies: grapes and chocolate. Men in hospital
have no money. Any money they have is taken away when they arrive and
refunded when they leave. Like most of the rules in the army to-day,
this was made for the old regulars. When the regulars felt they needed
a rest they went into hospital; the only way they could be stopped was
to keep all their money away from them. To-day two million men suffer
as a result. Ever since the day I left the Peninsula I had wanted
chocolate. But I had no money, and for a long time I had to go without
it. At last young Varney got me some. He had gone errands for a
wounded Australian, who had been given some money from outside, and
the Australian had given him some; he could hardly wait to get to me
with it.
As soon as a man was sufficiently recovered to travel, he was sent to
England. New men were always coming in to take the places of the old.
A lot of them were Australians. I kept asking them all as they came in
if they could tell me anything of my friend White George. Of course a
nickname is very little to go on. A man who was White George in one
part of the trench might be Queensland Harry in another. All I knew
about him was that he was in the Fifteenth Battalion, and that he had
a beard. At last a chap did come in one evening from the Fifteenth
Battalion. I was in bed at the time, and could not get a chance to ask
him about White George. The next day the poor chap was writhing and
screaming in the terrible spasms of tetanus, and for two days the
screens were around his bed. On the third day he was better. As soon
as Varney came in, he wheeled me up to the Australian's bed. I asked
him what was the matter with him, and he told me that he had a flesh
wound in the head that didn't bother him, but that his left leg was
off at the knee.
"Are you from the Fifteenth Battalion?" I asked.
"Yes," he said.
"Do you know a chap in that battalion," I said, "that they call White
George?"
The wounded Australian looked at me in a quizzical way. Then he
drawled slowly, "Well, I think I do. Why, damn it, man, I'm White
George."
Then he recognized me. "Why, it's the Newfoundland Corporal. Hello,
Corporal. You're just the man I wanted to see," he said. "I stood on
that bomb all right, and got away with it--once. When I tried it a
second time, I put the bomb on the firing platform, and when I
stepped on it, my head was over the parapet; Johnny Turk got me in the
head, and the bomb did the rest."
"Don't you wish now you hadn't tried the experiment?" I said.
"No," said White George, "I feel perfectly satisfied."
"By the way," I said, as I was leaving him, "why do they call you
White George? Your hair is dark."
"My real name," he said, "is George White, but on the regimental roll
it reads 'White, George.'"