I could see my part in this battle was over.

CHAPTER XXXI

SLOWLY RECOVERING—­FIELD HOSPITAL—­AMBULANCE
TRAIN—­BACK IN ENGLAND

How I ever got back I don’t know.  I remember dragging myself into a cottage, in the garden of which lay a row of dead men.  I remember some one giving me a glass of water there, and seeing a terribly mutilated body on the floor being attended to.  And, finally, I remember being helped down the Wieltj road by a man into a field dressing station.  Here I was labelled and sent immediately down to a hospital about four miles away.  Arrived there, I lay out on a bench in a collapsed state, and I remember a cheery doctor injecting something into my wrist.  I then lay on a stretcher awaiting further transportation.  My good servant Smith somehow discovered my whereabouts, and turned up at this hospital.  He sat beside me and gave me a writing-pad to scribble a note on.  I scrawled a line to my mother to say I had been knocked out, but was perfectly all right.  Smith went back to the battalion, and I lay on the stretcher, partially asleep.  Night came on and I went off into a series of agonizing dreams.  I awoke with a start.  I was being lifted up from the floor on the stretcher.  They carried me out.  It was bright moonlight, and looking up I saw the moon, a dazzling white against the dark blue sky.  The stretcher and I were pushed into an ambulance in which were three other cases beside myself.  We were driven off to some station or other.  I stared up at the canvas bottom of the stretcher above me, trying to realize it all.  Presently we reached the train.  Another glimpse of the moon, and I was slid into the ambulance car....

In three days I was back in England at a London hospital—­“A fragment from France.”

[Illustration:  FINIS]