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That was two years later, at the end of the Somme battles. I
was worn out and bloodless after five months of hard strain and
nervous wear and tear. Some bug had bitten me up in the fields where
lay the unburied dead.
"Trench fever," said the doctor.
"You look in need of a rest," said the matron. "My word, how white you
are! Had a hard time, eh, like the rest of them?"
I lay in bed at the end of the officers' ward, with only one other bed
between me and the wall. That was occupied by the gunner-general of
the New Zealand Division. Opposite was another row of beds in which
officers lay sleeping, or reading, or lying still with wistful eyes.
"That's all right. You're going to die!" said a rosy--cheeked young
orderly, after taking my temperature and feeling my pulse. It was his
way of cheering a patient up. He told me how he had been torpedoed in
the Dardanelles while he was ill with dysentery. He indulged in
reminiscences with the New Zealand general who had a grim gift of
silence, but glinting eyes.


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