ncies of the hospital, over the food, over the M.O.'s
lack of imagination, over the intolerable habits of the man in the next
bed; you must not sigh 'I know ...' to any of these plaints.

"Yours is the running of the ward. Yours the isolation of a crowned
head.

"One day you said a penetrating thing to me:

"'He's not very ill, but he's feeling wretched. Run along and do the
sympathetic V.A.D. touch!'

"For a moment I, just able to do a poultice or a fomentation, resented
it.

"But you were right.... One has one's _metier_."

III

"THE BOYS ..."

So now one steps down from chintz covers and lemonade to the Main Army
and lemon-water.

And to show how little one has one's eye upon the larger issues, the
thing that upset me most on coming into a "Tommies'" ward was the fact
that instead of twenty-six lemons twice a day for the making of lemonade
I now squeeze two into an old jug and hope for the best about the sugar.

Smiff said to-day, "Give us a drop of lemon, nurse...." And the Sister:
"Go on with you! I won't have the new nurse making a pet of you...."

I suppose I'm new to it, and one can't carry on the work that way, but,
God knows, the water one can add to a lemon is cheap enough!

Smiff had a flash of temper to-night. He said: "Keepin' me here starin'
at green walls this way! Nothing but green, nine blessed months!"

His foot is off, and to-night for the first time the doctor had promised
that he should be wheeled into the corridor. But it was forgotten, and I
am too new to jog the memory of the gods.

It's a queer place, a "Tommies'" ward. It makes me nervous. I'm not
simple enough; they make me shy. I can't think of them like the others
do, as "the boys"; they seem to me full-grown men.

I suffer awfully from my language in this ward. I seem to be the only
V.A.D. of whom they continually ask, "What's say, nurse?" It isn't that
I use long words, but my sentences seem to be inverted.

An opportunity for learning to speak simple Saxon....

"An antitetanic injection for Corrigan," said Sister. And I went to the
dispensary to fetch the syringe and the needles.

"But has he any symptoms?" I asked. (In a Tommies' ward one dare ask
anything; there isn't that mystery which used to surround the officers'
illnesses.)

"Oh no," she said, "it's just that he hasn't had his full amount in
France."

So I hunted up the spirit-lamp and we prepared it, talking of it.

But we forgot to talk of