I think sometimes of a night I spent with the
medical officers of a tent hospital in the fields of the Somme during
those battles. With me as a guest went a modern Falstaff, a "ton of
flesh," who "sweats to death and lards the lean earth as he walks
along."
He was a man of many anecdotes, drawn from the sinks and stews of
life, yet with a sense of beauty lurking under his coarseness, and a
voice of fine, sonorous tone, which he managed with art and a melting
grace.
On the way to the field hospital he had taken more than one nip of
whisky. His voice was well oiled when he sang a greeting to a medical
major in a florid burst of melody from Italian opera. The major was a
little Irish medico who had been through the South African War and in
tropical places, where he had drunk fire-water to kill all manner of
microbes. He suffered abominably from asthma and had had a heart-
seizure the day before our dinner at his mess, and told us that he
would drop down dead as sure as fate between one operation and another
on "the poor, bloody wounded" who never ceased to flow into his tent.
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