m again. How irksomely slow the days
pass until the score reaches his winning-line of normal! and in time
he sees how easily it might have been otherwise. His room-mate on his
right got delirious, and refused all nourishment. He struggled
violently even against the stimulants prescribed for him. His nurse
would spend half an hour trying to get a little down. Then he had seen
an extreme attempt made to feed him one night. He was held while a
tube was passed through the back of his nose and so down his throat,
but no sooner was it down than the strength of fever, like that of a
maniac, proved too strong for his nurses; they could no longer hold
him. There was a horrible struggle, with choking coughs and dark blood
flowing from his nostrils, and the brandy was spilt on his face and
smarting in his eyes. He spent days dying, and more rapid and more
feeble grew his pulse, and many times the nurse said there was none
perceptible, and then the life would flicker up again. One morning
early a bugle sounded outside. He said, "I am on outpost duty to-day;
I must get up at once." He half lifted himself in the bed, repeating,
"I tell you I am on outpost duty." The nurse pressed him back gently,
and he died. He seemed to have no friends or relatives, no one who
knew anything about him. There was a letter found in his pocket
showing that he had a mother in a village in Ireland, and that he was
her only son.

On the other side of our friend was a poor fellow unceasingly racked
with pain either in head or abdomen. His temperature was not
extremely high, but he seemed to be falling away from the pain of the
poisonous disease. His pulse was weak, and had to be kept going with
constant stimulants. When in the ordinary course of things the disease
should have passed he got a series of rigors and shivering fits about
every third day, with a cold sweat. While the shivering was on him his
temperature would drop to normal or lower, and then bound up to 103 or
104. He had a terrible dread of these fits, and it was pitiful to see
him watching their oncoming. Each one that came left him weaker as it
passed off.

We are coming back to England in a ship laden with the human wreckage
of war--the wounded, the maimed, the sick, who to their graves will
carry the maiming of their sickness. There are, amongst these men,
those who will crawl about the world lop-sided, incomplete cripples,
or those who will be perpetually victims to intermittent or chro