I am to help to look after Mr. ----. He has the pick of the Belgian Red
Cross women to nurse him, and they are angelically kind and very
skilful, but he is not very happy with them. He says: "These dear people
are so good to me, but I can't make out what they say. I can't tell them
what I want." He is pathetically glad to have any English people with
him. (Even I am a little better than a Belgian whom he cannot
understand.)
I sat with him all morning. The French boy has gone and he is alone in
his room now. It seems that the kind Chaplain sat up with him all last
night after his hard day at Melle. (I wish now I had stood by the
Chaplain with his Matins. He has never tried to have them again--given
us up as an unholy crew, all except Mr. Foster, whom he clings to.)
The morning went like half an hour, while it was going; but when it was
over I felt as if I had been nursing for weeks on end. There were so
many little things to be done, and so much that you mustn't do, and the
anxiety was appalling. I don't suppose there is a worse case in the
Hospital. He is perhaps a shade better to-day, but none of the medical
staff think that he can live.
Madame E---- and Dr. Bird have shown me what to do, and what not to do.
I must keep him all the time in the same position. I must give him sips
of iced broth, and little pieces of ice to suck every now and then. I
must not let him try to raise himself in bed. I must not try to lift him
myself. If we do lift him we must keep his body tilted at the same
angle. I must not give him any hot drinks and not too much cold drink.
And he is six foot high, so tall that his feet come through the blankets
at the bottom of the bed; and he keeps sinking down in it all the time
and wanting to raise himself up again. And his fever makes him restless.
And he is always thirsty and he longs for hot tea more than iced water,
and for more iced water than is good for him. The iced broth that is his
only nourishment he does not want at all.
And then he must be kept very quiet. I must not let him talk more than
is necessary to tell me what he wants, or he will die of exhaustion. And
what he wants is to talk every minute that he is awake.
He drops off to sleep, breathing in jerks and with a terrible rapidity.
And I think it will be all right as long as he sleeps. But his sleep
only lasts for a few minutes. I hear the rhythm of his breathing alter;
it slackens and goes slow; then it jerks again, and I know that he is
awake.
And then he begins. He says things that tear at your heart. He has looks
and gestures that break it--the adorable, wilful smile of a child that
knows that it is being watched when you find his hand groping too often
for the glass of iced water that stands beside his bed; a still more
adorable and utterly gentle submission when you take the glass from him;
when you tell him not to say anything more just yet but to go to sleep
again. You feel as if you were guilty of act after act of nameless and
abominable cruelty.
He sticks to it that he has seen me before, that he has heard of me,
that his people know me. And he wants to know what I do and where I live
and where it was that he saw me. Once, when I thought he had gone to
sleep, I heard him begin again: "Where did you say you lived?"