a price we shall get it....

Scutts and Monk talk to me while I sew, but what about the Monks,
Scutts, Gayners, whose wounds will never need a dressing or a tube--who
lie along a front of two miles, one on his face, another on his back?

Since 3.15 this morning a lot of men have died. Thank God one cannot go
on realizing death.

But one need not think of it. This is a ward; here are lucky ones. Even
when I look at Rees, even when I look at the grocer, even when I look at
the T.B. ward, I know that anything, _anything_ is better than death.
But I have known a man here and there who did not think so--and these
men, close on death it is true, were like strangers in the ward.

For one can be close on death and remain familiar, friendly,
comprehensible.

I used to think, "It is awful to die." But who knows what compliance the
years will bring? What is awful is to die _young_.

A new V.A.D. came into the ward yesterday--a girl straight from home,
who has never been in a hospital before.

Rees told me, "She turned her head away when she saw me arm."

"I did once, Rees."

He looked down at the almost unrecognizable twelve inches which we call
"Rees's wound," and considered how this red inch had paled and the lips
of that incision were drawing together. "'Tisn' no more me arm," he said
at length, "than...." he paused for a simile. "'Tisn' me arm, it's me
wound," he finally explained.

His arm is stretched out at right angles from his bed in an iron cradle,
and has been for six months.

"Last night," he said, "I felt me arm layin' down by me side, an' I felt
the fingers an' tried to scratch me knee. It's a feeling that's bin
comin' on for some time, but last night it seemed real."

The pain of the dressing forces Rees's reason to lay some claim to his
arm, but when it ceases to hurt him he detaches himself from it to such
a point that the ghost-arm familiar to all amputations has arrived, as
it were, by mistake.

The new V.A.D. doesn't talk much at present, being shy, but to-night I
can believe she will write in her diary as I wrote in mine: "My feet
ache, ache, ache...." Add to that that she is hungry because she hasn't
yet learnt how to break the long stretches with hurried gnawings behind
a door, that she is sick because the philosophy of Rees is not yet her
philosophy, that her hands and feet grow cold and her body turns to warm
milk, that she longs so to sit on a bed that she can almost visualize
the depre