for the minute--their present hope for the
cup of tea, for the visiting day, for the concert; their future hope for
the drying of the wound, for the day when the Sister's fingers may
press, but no drop be wrung from the long scar.

Isn't it curious to wish so passionately for the day which may place
them near to death again?

But the longing for health is a simple instinct, undarkened by logic.

Yet some of them have plans. Scutts has plans.

For a fortnight now he has watched for the post. "Parcel come for me,
Sister? Small parcel?"

Or he will meet the postman in the corridor. "Got my eye yet?" he asks.

"What will it be like, Scutts?" we ask. "Can you move it? Can you sleep
in it? Did he match your other carefully?"

"You'll see," he says confidently. "It's grand."

"When I get my eye...." he says, almost with the same longing with
which he says "When I get into civies...."

Scutts is not one of those whose life is stopped; he has made plans.
"When I get into civies and walk out of here...." His plans for six
months' holiday "are all writ down in me notebook."

"But what shall you do, Scutts? Go to London?"

"London!... No towns fer me!"

He will not tell us what he is going to do. Secretly I believe it is
something he wanted to do as a boy but thought himself a fool to carry
out when he was a man: perhaps it is a sort of walking tour.

Among his eleven wounds he has two crippled arms. "I'm safe enough from
death," he says (meaning France), "till it fetches me in a proper way."

Perhaps he means to live as though life were really a respite from
death.

I had a day on the river yesterday.

"_I_ seed yer with yer bit of erdy-furdy roun' yer neck an' yer little
attachy-case," said Pinker.

"A nurse's life is one roun' of pleasure," said Pinker to the ward.

We had two operations yesterday--one on a sergeant who has won the
D.C.M. and has a certificate written in gold which hangs above his bed,
telling of his courage and of one particular deed; the other on a Welsh
private.

I wonder what the sergeant was like before he won his D.C.M....

There is something unreal about him; he is like a stage hero. He has a
way of saying, "Now, my men, who is going to volunteer to fetch the
dinners?" which is like an invitation to go over the top.

The men gape when he says that, then go on with their cards. It is like
a joke.

Before his operation he was full of partially concealed boastings as to
how he