Not that day, but the next one, my supplication to the Almighty was put to the test. The doctor came along the ward on his cheerful morning inspection. Arriving at my bed he asked how I was feeling. I stared up at him, incapable of asserting that I felt ill and unwilling to admit that I felt well. Fortunately he didn’t expect a reply. “Well, we’ll have to be moving you on,” he said with a smile; and before my heart had time to beat again he turned to the nurse with, “Put him down for the afternoon train.” The nurse made a note of it, and my mind uttered a spontaneous Magnificat. Now, with any luck, I thought, I’ll get a couple of weeks at one of those hospitals on the coast, at Etretat or Le Tréport, probably. The idea of reading a book by the seaside was blissful. No one could blame me for that, and I should be back with the Battalion by the end of August, if not earlier.
In my hurried exodus from my billet at La Chaussée, some of my belongings had been left behind, and good old Flook had brought them to the hospital next day. He had come treading in with clumsy embarrassment to deposit the packful of oddments by my bed, announcing in a hoarse undertone, “Ah’ve brought the stoof,” and telling me that the lads in C Company were hoping to see me back soon. Somehow Flook, with his rough and ready devotion, had seemed my strongest link with the Battalion. When I shook his hand and said goodbye, he winked and advised me, confidentially, not to be in too much of a hurry about getting back. A good rest would do me no harm, he said; but as he tiptoed away I wondered when he himself would get a holiday, and whether he would ever return to his signal-box on the railway.
The details of my journey to the Base were as follows. First of all I was carried carefully down the stairs on a stretcher (though I could easily have walked to the ambulance, or even to the railway station, if such an effort had been demanded of me). Then the ambulance took me to Corbie, and from there the train (with 450 casualties on board) rumbled sedately to Rouen; we did the sixty miles in ten hours, and at two o’clock in the morning I was carried into No. 2 Red Cross Hospital. I remember that particular hospital with affection. During the morning a genial doctor came along and had a look at me. “Well, my lad, what’s wrong with you?” he asked. “They call it enteritis,” I replied, with an indefinite grin. He had a newspaper in his hand as he glanced at the descriptive chart behind my bed. My name caused him to consult The Times. “Is this you?” he asked. Sure enough, my name was there, in a list of Military Crosses which chanced to have appeared that day. The doctor patted me on the shoulder and informed me that I should be going across to England next day. Good luck had “wangled me home.” Even now I cannot think of that moment without believing that I was involved in one of the lesser miracles of the Great War. For I am certain that I should have remained at Rouen if that observant and kindhearted doctor hadn’t noticed my name among the decorations. And in that case I should have been back with the Battalion in nice time for their operations at Delville Wood, which might quite conceivably have qualified my name for a place on the Butley village War Memorial.
The Hospital Ship left Rouen about midday. While we steamed down the Seine in fine weather I lay watching the landscape through a porthole with a sense of thankfulness which differed from any I had ever known before. A label was attached to me; I have kept that label, and it is in my left hand as I write these words. It is marked Army Form W 3083
, though in shape and substance it is an ordinary civilian luggage label. It is stamped Lying Train and Ship
in blue letters, with Sick P.U.O.
on the other side. On the boat, my idle brain wondered what “P.U.O.” meant. There must, I thought, be a disease beginning with P. Perhaps it was “Polypipsis unknown origin.” Between Rouen and Havre I devised several feebly funny solutions, such as “Perfectly undamaged officer.” But my final choice was “Poorly until October.”
At noon next day we reached Southampton. Nothing could be better than this, I thought, while being carried undeservedly from the ship to the train; and I could find no fault with Hampshire’s quiet cornfields and unwarlike woods in the drowsy August afternoon. At first I guessed that we were on our way to London; but when the journey showed signs of cross-countryhood I preferred not to be told where we were going. Recumbent, I gazed gloatingly at England. Peaceable stay-at-homes waved to the Red Cross Train, standing still to watch it pass. It was nice to think that I’d been fighting for them, though exactly what I’d done to help them was difficult to define. An elderly man, cycling along a dusty road in a dark blue suit and a straw hat, removed one hand from the handlebars to wave comprehensive gratitude. Everything seemed happy and homely. I was delivered from
