older than a schoolboy who was
mine and who still liked to be tucked up in bed by his mother. With his
tousled hair and his petulant grimace, this lieutenant might have been
Peter Pan, from Kensington. The night nurse pretended to chide him.
It was a very gentle chiding, but as abruptly as he had thrown off his
clothes he snuggled under them again and said: "All right, I'll be good.
Only I want a kiss before I go to sleep."

I became good friends with that boy, who was a promising young poet, and
a joyous creature no more fit for war than a child of ten, hating the
muck and horror of it, not ashamed to confess his fear, with a boyish
wistfulness of hope that he might not be killed, because he loved life.
But he was killed... I had a letter from his stricken mother months
afterward. The child was "Missing" then, and her heart cried out for
him.

Opposite my bed was a middle-aged man from Lancashire--I suppose he
had been in a cotton-mill or a factory--a hard-headed, simple-hearted
fellow, as good as gold, and always speaking of "the wife." But his
nerves had gone to pieces and he was afraid to sleep because of the
dreams that came to him.

"Sister," he said, "don't let me go to sleep. Wake me up if you see me
dozing. I see terrible things in my dreams. Frightful things. I can't
bear it."

"You will sleep better to-night," she said. "I am putting something in
your milk. Something to stop the dreaming."

But he dreamed. I lay awake, feverish and restless, and heard the man
opposite muttering and moaning, in his sleep. Sometimes he would give a
long, quivering sigh, and sometimes start violently, and then wake up in
a dazed way, saying:

"Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" trembling with fear, so that the bed was
shaken. The night nurse was always by his side in a moment when he
called out, hushing him down, whispering to him.

"I see pools of blood and bits of dead bodies in my sleep," he told me.
"It's what I saw up at Bazentin. There was a fellow with his face blown
off, walking about. I see him every night. Queer, isn't it? Nerves, you
know. I didn't think I had a nerve in my body before this war."

The little night nurse came to my bedside.

"Can't you sleep?"

"I'm afraid not. My heart is thumping in a queer way. May I smoke?"

She put a cigarette between my lips and lighted a match.

"Take a few whiffs and then try to sleep. You need lots of sleep."

In the ward there was only the glimmer of night lights in red