In all his life, I never had to admonish my son once.  Not once.  He was the most considerate lad I have ever known.  He was always thinking of others.  He was always doing for others.

It was with such thoughts as these that John’s mother and I filled in the time between his letters.  They came as if by a schedule.  We knew what post should bring one.  And once or twice a letter was a post late and our hearts were in our throats with fear.  And then came a day when there should have been a letter, and none came.  The whole day passed.  I tried to comfort John’s mother!  I tried to believe myself that it was no more than a mischance of the post.  But it was not that.

We could do nought but wait.  Ah, but the folks at home in Britain know all too well those sinister breaks in the chains of letters from the front!  Such a break may mean nothing or anything.

For us, news came quickly.  But it was not a letter from John that came to us.  It was a telegram from the war office and it told us no more than that our boy was wounded and in hospital.

CHAPTER VI

“Wounded and in hospital!”

That might have meant anything.  And for a whole week that was all we knew.  To hope for word more definite until—­and unless—­John himself could send us a message, appeared to be hopeless.  Every effort we made ended in failure.  And, indeed, at such a time, private inquiries could not well be made.  The messages that had to do with the war and with the business of the armies had to be dealt with first.

But at last, after a week in which his mother and I almost went mad with anxiety, there came a note from our laddie himself.  He told us not to fret—­that all that ailed him was that his nose was split and his wrist bashed up a bit!  His mother looked at me and I at her.  It seemed bad enough to us!  But he made light of his wounds—­aye, and he was right!  When I thought of men I’d seen in hospitals—­men with wounds so frightful that they may not be told of—­I rejoiced that John had fared so well.

And I hoped, too, that his wounds would bring him home to us—­to Blighty, as the Tommies were beginning to call Britain.  But his wounds were not serious enough for that and so soon as they were healed, he went back to the trenches.

“Don’t worry about me,” he wrote to us.  “Lots of fellows out here have been wounded five and six times, and don’t think anything of it.  I’ll be all right so long as I don’t get knocked out.”

He didn’t tell us then that it was the bursting of a shell that gave him his first wounded stripe.  But he wrote to us regularly again, and there were scarcely any days in which a letter did not come either to me or to his mother.  When one of those breaks did come it was doubly hard to bear now.

For now we knew what it was to dread the sight of a telegraph messenger.  Few homes in Britain there are that do not share that knowledge now.  It is by telegraph, from the war office, that bad news comes first.  And so, with the memory of that first telegram that we had had, matters were even worse, somehow, than they had been before.  For me the days and nights dragged by as if they would never pass.