It is only a bad attack of influenza.  I lie here in a dim, brown holland coloured twilight.  A large marquee of double folded canvas keeps out the sun; a few shafts of light twinkle through here and there.  Through three entrance gaps I catch glimpses, crossed by a web of tent ropes, of other surrounding tents, each neatly enclosed by a border of whitened stones, the purpose of which is to prevent people at night from tripping over the ropes.  Everything is scrupulously neat and clean.  Orderlies run from tent to tent minding their patients.  Every now and then a pretty little nursing sister, with white cuffs and scarlet pelisse, trips across the open spaces between the straight lines of marquees, or stops to have a moment’s chat and a little quiet bit of a flirt (they can always find time for that, I notice) with one of the officers or doctors.  I watch with faint interest and a feeling of vague recollection.  She looks up sideways and shades the sun off her eyes with her fingers.  They keep it up still then!

Some way off, among the Tommies’ quarters, I can see groups of patients in clean, dark-blue clothes walking about, or sitting on seats, taking the air; some hobbling on crutches, some with arms in slings, heads bandaged, or patched and mended in some way or other.  You feel like some damaged implement tossed aside a moment for repair.  “Mend me this lieutenant!” The doctors get to work, deft and quick; a little strengthening, repairing, polishing, and out you are shot again.

It has been the only glimpse of absolute peace and rest I have had this eleven months.  Every one is kind and sympathetic; a cool breeze blows through the looped-up tents; it is all very luxurious and pleasant for wearied-out soldiers.  I like to lie and watch the little pictures through the tent openings of low blue veldt hills in the distance (which somehow remind one of the background glimpses in old Italian pictures), and dream over things one has seen and done, many of which seem already such ages ago, and listen to the bugle calls that sound at intervals in the camp.  I have managed to buy some pyjamas.  Probably you would see something very ludicrous in the way in which, after an elaborate hot-bath and hair-cutting, dressed out in one’s clean pyjamas and lying between clean sheets, one rolls one’s eyes with unutterable complacency on one’s surroundings.  All our comforts are attended to.  We have a shell-proof shelter in a ravine close by, handy in case of visits from De Wet; and the two great cow-guns, like guardian angels, doze on the top of the hill behind the hospital.  Under the shadow of their wing I always feel perfectly safe.