But he dreamed. I lay awake, feverish and restless, and heard the man opposite muttering and moaning, in his sleep. Sometimes he would give a long, quivering sigh, and sometimes start violently, and then wake up in a dazed way, saying:
“Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” trembling with fear, so that the bed was shaken. The night nurse was always by his side in a moment when he called out, hushing him down, whispering to him.
“I see pools of blood and bits of dead bodies in my sleep,” he told me. “It’s what I saw up at Bazentin. There was a fellow with his face blown off, walking about. I see him every night. Queer, isn’t it? Nerves, you know. I didn’t think I had a nerve in my body before this war.”
The little night nurse came to my bedside.
“Can’t you sleep?”
“I’m afraid not. My heart is thumping in a queer way. May I smoke?”
She put a cigarette between my lips and lighted a match.
“Take a few whiffs and then try to sleep. You need lots of sleep.”
In the ward there was only the glimmer of night lights in red glasses, and now and then all through the night matches were lighted, illuminating the room for a second, followed by the glowing end of a cigarette shining like a star in the darkness.
The sleeping men breathed heavily, tossed about violently, gave strange jerks and starts. Sometimes they spoke aloud in their sleep.
“That isn’t a dud, you fool! It will blow us to hell.”
“Now then, get on with it, can’t you?”
“Look out! They’re coming! Can’t you see them moving by the wire?”
The spirit of war was in that ward and hunted them even in their sleep; lurking terrors surged up again in their subconsciousness. Sights which they had tried to forget stared at them through their closed eyelids. The daylight came and the night nurse slipped away, and the day nurse shook one’s shoulders and said: “Time to wash and shave. No malingering!”
It was the discipline of the hospital. Men as weak as rats had to sit up in bed, or crawl out of it, and shave themselves.
“You’re merciless!” I said, laughing painfully when the day nurse dabbed my back with cold iodine at six o’clock on a winter morning, with the windows wide open.
“Oh, there’s no mercy in this place!” said the strong-minded girl. “It’s kill or cure here, and no time to worry.”
“You’re all devils,” said the New Zealand general. “You don’t care a damn about the patients so long as you have all the beds tidy by the time the doctor comes around. I’m a general, I am, and you can’t order me about, and if you think I’m going to shave at this time in the morning you are jolly well mistaken. I am down with dysentery, and don’t you forget it. I didn’t get through the Dardanelles to be murdered at Amiens.”
“That’s where you may be mistaken, general,” said the imperturbable girl. “I have to carry out orders, and if they lead to your death it’s not my responsibility. I’m paid a poor wage for this job, but I do my duty, rough or smooth, kill or cure.”
“You’re a vampire. That’s what you are.”
“I’m a nurse.”
“If ever I hear you’re going to marry a New Zealand boy I’ll warn him against you.”
“He’ll be too much of a fool to listen to you.”
“I’ve a good mind to marry you myself and beat you every morning.”
“Modern wives have strong muscles. Look at my arm!”
Three nights in one week there were air raids, and as the German mark was the railway station we were in the center of the danger-zone. There was a frightful noise of splintering glass and smashing timber between each crash of high explosives. The whine of shrapnel from the antiaircraft guns had a sinister note, abominable in the ears of those officers who had come down from the fighting-lines nerve-racked and fever-stricken. They lay very quiet. The night nurse moved about from bed to bed, with her flash-lamp. Her face was pale, but she showed no other sign of fear and was braver than her patients at that time, though they had done the hero’s job all right.
It was in another hospital a year later, when I lay sick again, that an officer, a very gallant gentleman, said, “If there is another air raid I shall go mad.” He had been stationed near the blast-furnace of Les Izelquins, near Béthune, and had been in many air raids, when over sixty-three shells had blown his hut to bits and killed his men, until he could bear it no more. In the Amiens hospital some of the patients had their heads under the bedclothes like little children.
XVI
The life of Amiens ended for a while, and the city was deserted by all its people, after the night of March 30, 1918, which will be remembered forever to the age-long history of Amiens as its night of greatest tragedy. For a week the enemy had been advancing across the old battlefields after the first onslaught in the morning of March 21st, when our lines were stormed and broken by his men’s odds against our defending troops. We war correspondents had suffered mental agonies like all who knew what had happened better than the troops themselves. Every day after the first breakthrough we pushed out in different directions—Hamilton Fyfe and I went together sometimes until we came up with the backwash of the great retreat, ebbing back and back, day after day, with increasing speed, until it drew very close to Amiens. It was a kind of ordered chaos, terrible to see. It was a chaos like that of upturned ant-heaps, but with each ant trying to rescue its eggs and sticks in a persistent, orderly way, directed by some controlling or communal intelligence, only instead of eggs and sticks
