“It was like this,” said she.  “When I heard it was a corpse, I thought I’d have my tea first!” (This was almost as bad as the tape measure episode and was of course conclusive.  I might add, corpses were the only jobs that were not allowed to interfere with meals.)

“Foreign bodies,” in the shape of former Belgian patients, often drifted up to camp in search of the particular “Mees” who had tended them at Lamarck, as often as not bringing souvenirs made at great pains in the trenches as tokens of their gratitude.  It touched us very much to know that they had not forgotten.

One night when my evening duty was nearing its close and I was just preparing to go to my hut the telephone bell rang, and I was told to go down to the hospital ship we had just loaded that afternoon for a man reported to be in a dying condition, and not likely to stand the journey across to England—­I never could understand why those cases should have been evacuated at all if there was any possibility of them becoming suddenly worse; but I suppose a certain number of beds had to be cleared for new arrivals, and individuals could not be considered.  It seemed very hard.

I drove down to the Quay in the inky blackness, it was a specially dark night, turned successfully, and reported I had come for the case.

An orderly, I am thankful to say, came with him in the car and sat behind holding his hand.

The boy called incessantly for his mother and seemed hardly to realize where he was.  I sat forward, straining my eyes in the darkness along that narrow quay, on the look-out for the many holes I knew were only too surely there.

The journey seemed to take hours, and I answered a query of the orderly’s as to the distance.

The boy heard my voice and mistook me for one of the Sisters, and then followed one of the most trying half-hours I have ever been through.

He seemed to regain consciousness to a certain extent and asked me from time to time,

“Sister, am I dying?”

“Will I see me old mother again, Sister?”

“Why have you taken me off the Blighty ship, Sister?”

Then there would be silence for a space, broken only by groans and an occasional “Christ, but me back ’urts crool,” and all the comfort I could give was that we would be there soon, and the doctor would do something to ease the pain.

Thank God, at last we arrived at the Casino.  One of the most trying things about ambulance driving is that while you long to get the patient to hospital as quickly as possible you are forced to drive slowly.  I jumped out and cautioned the orderlies to lift him as gently as they could, and he clung on to my hand as I walked beside the stretcher into the ward.

“You’re telling me the truth, Sister?  I don’t want to die, I tell you that straight,” he said.  “Goodbye and God bless you; I’ll come and see you in the morning,” I said, and left him to the nurses’ tender care.  I went down early next day but he had died at 3 a.m.  Somebody’s son and only nineteen.  That sort of job takes the heart out of you for some days, though Heaven knows we ought to have got used to anything by that time.