nsisting on the egg and milk
that interspaced all meals. It is so easy to get a reputation for
kindness by being too complacent in giving way to requests for morphia.
It made one feel such an absolute brute to disregard the wistful
pleading eye, the hands that tugged at the mosquito curtains to show
they were awake, when, late at night, I made my evening round. But it
had to be done, and I fear the work and the sun and the tropics made
one's temper very short, particularly when it was only possible by
losing one's temper to preserve the indifference to these influences
that was necessary to complete the cure. It was very hard on them at the
time, especially as they were rotten with malaria and tick fever, in
addition to their wounds. But there were other ways in which one made it
up to them, if they did but know it. Nor did they see that quinine given
by the veins, so much more trouble to me and to the sister, was better
for them than the quinine tablet that was so easily swallowed, and so
ineffectual. Nor could they, one thought, always know that 606 had to be
given for tick fever, and that it was of no value save when given at the
height of fever, when they felt so miserable and so disinclined to be
disturbed.

There was Shelley, the Irishman, a big policeman from Johannesburg,
badly wounded in the thigh. He had been taken prisoner by the Germans
and remained so for three days, until our next advance found him
installed in the German hospital. His wound was so bad that amputation
alone was left to do. When the worst of the dressings was over and the
stage of daily change of gauze and bandage had arrived, he always liked
Sister Elizabeth to do his dressings. Sister's hands were much more
gentle than mine, and Shelley always associated me with pain, little
knowing that, if a dressing is to be well and properly done, it is
always inseparable from a certain amount of suffering. But I saw through
his blarney, and he was added to the list of those who preferred
sister's hands to my attentions.

And there was Rose, a mere lad, who had also lost a leg from wounds; he
lay awake at night, though not in great pain, during the process of
breaking him of the morphia habit. When I pretended not to hear his
little moan, as I made my evening round, he tugged at his mosquito
curtain to show that he was awake. But asperin and bromide and a nightly
drink of hot brandy and water soon broke off this habit. After that it
was easy to cut