He was put on one side as a
man about to die. . . But that evening he chattered cheerfully, joked
with the priest who came to anoint him, and wrote a letter to his
wife.
"I hope this will find you in the pink, as it leaves me," he began. He
mentioned that he had had an "accident" which had taken one of his
legs away. "But the youngsters will like to play with my wooden peg,"
he wrote, and discussed the joke of it. The people round his bed
marveled at him, though day after day they saw great courage; such
courage as that of another man who was brought in mortally wounded and
lay next to a comrade on the operating table.
"Stick it, lad!" he said, "stick it!" and turned his head a little to
look at his friend.
Many of our camps were hardly better than the trenches. Only by duck-
boards could one walk about the morass in which huts were built and
tents were pitched. In the wagon lines gunners tried in vain to groom
their horses, and floundered about in their gum boots, cursing the mud
which clogged bits and chains and bridles, and could find no comfort
anywhere between Dickebusch and Locre.
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