They were journeying to the Clearing Hospital.  The road, bad at the best of times, was now pitted with shell holes, and was truly abominable.  “Is a country,” he said to himself, “that will not allow its wounded pneumatic tyres to ride upon, worth fighting for?”

They jolted on through the remaining part of the night.  At dawn they were disembarked, and put to rest in a little farm-house, where they gave them soup and milk.  But there were only mattresses thrown on a stone floor, and the pain in his spine was so acute that he almost forgot about his head.

His companion on the journey was placed in the same room.  At the beginning of the night he had pitied the poor fellow immensely.  But his prayers and entreaties were too pitiful to bear.  What he must have been suffering!  It added an extra weight to his own burden.  Thank God, he had never been very thirsty!

“Just a little water!  Just a drop.  I won’t swallow it.  I won’t!  I swear before Heaven I won’t!  Just a teaspoonful!  Please!...  Oh!  I’m dying of thirst....  Only a drop....  I won’t swallow it this time....  There’s five pounds in my pocket.”  He would gurgle and groan pitifully for a moment.  Then in a voice, astoundingly loud, but thick with blood, he would shout, quaveringly:  “Orderly, blast you, you ——­, give me some water, or I’ll—­”

Sad to say, there came a time when the Subaltern could bear it no longer.  His own troubles and the entreaties of the other unnerved him.

“Give him water!  Chuck it at him!  In a bucket!” he shouted in a frenzy.  “Let the poor wretch die happy, anyway.”

The Corporal in charge came over to him.

“You might get me some milk, Corporal,” he said.

“For you, sir?”

“Oh no!  You ——­, to water the plants with, of course!”

“I was only asking, sir.”

“All right, Corp’ral.  Can’t you see I’m a little upset this morning?”

* * * * *

They carried him on to the Clearing Hospital in a motor Ambulance, and deposited him in the hall of a little estaminet that had been turned into an Officer’s Hospital.

A Doctor and Sister were conversing in low tones outside a closed door.

“I’m afraid there are all the symptoms of enteric,” she was saying.

Neither of them took the slightest notice of him.  But he was getting used to being carried about and never spoken to, like a piece of furniture.  And the Sister entranced him.  The Clearing Hospitals were the nearest places to the fighting-line that women could aspire to.  He had not seen an English lady since leaving England.  And her waist pleased him.  Such few French peasant women had any waists at all.  And her voice was higher-pitched; more intellectual, if less poetic.

When the two of them had quite finished discussing their “case” she called for an Orderly, and without so much as looking at him, said, “Put that one in there,” indicating another door.  Another Orderly was fetched, and the painful business of hauling him off the stretcher on to a bed began once more.