w days."

"Aren't you sorry you're out of it?"

"Me?" The Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantryman shook his head. "I take
things as I finds 'em, and I finds this quite good enough."

So they chatted and, in the soldier's way, became friends. Later, the
surgeon arrived and probed Doggie's wound and hurt him exquisitely, so
that the perspiration stood out on his forehead, and his jaws ached
afterwards from his clenching of them. While his leg was being dressed
he reflected that, a couple of years ago, if anyone had inflicted a
twentieth part of such torture on him he would have yelled the house
down. He remembered, with an inward grin, the anguished precautions on
which he had insisted whenever he sat down in the chair of his
expensive London dentist.

"It must have hurt like fun," said the nurse, busily engaged with the
gauze dressing.

"It's all in the day's work," replied Doggie.

The nurse pinned the bandage and settled him comfortably in bed.

"No one will worry you till dinner-time. You'd better try to have a
sleep."

So Doggie nodded and smiled and curled up as best he could and slept
the heavy sleep of the tired young animal. It was only when he awoke,
physically rested and comparatively free from pain, that his mind,
hitherto confused, began to work clearly, to straighten out the three
days' tangle. Yes, just three days. A fact almost impossible to
realize. Till now it had seemed an eternity.

He lay with his arms crossed under his head and stared at the blue
sky--a soft, comforting English sky. The ward was silent. Only two
beds were occupied, one by a man asleep, the other by a man reading a
novel. His other room-mates, including his neighbour Penworthy, were
so far convalescent as to be up and away, presumably by the
life-giving sea, whose rhythmic murmur he could hear. For the first
time since he awoke to find himself bandaged up in a strange dug-out,
and surrounded by strange faces, did the chaos of his ideas resolve
itself into anything like definite memories. Yet many of them were
still vague.

He had been out there, with the wiring party, in the dark. He had been
glad, he remembered, to escape from the prison of the trench into the
open air. He was having some difficulty with a recalcitrant bit of
wire that refused to come straight and jabbed him diabolically in
unexpected places, when a shot rang out and German flares went up and
everybody lay flat on the ground, while bullets spat about them.