ion in the R.A.M.C.--for there was
nothing definite against me: only I was ruined, and my old
credentials, set against my present squalor, were so
comparatively splendid as to raise instant suspicion of drink
and disgrace. But it was part of my just punishment that, when
I most needed help, you should be far abroad searching for the
very island on which I had shipwrecked all.

"Finally I found work as a dresser in one of those temporary
hospitals which sprang up everywhere in such hurry as the
streams of wounded began to pour back from France. Ours was
pitched in a derelict pleasure-ground on the right bank of
Thames some way below Greenwich. . . . I don't suppose you ever
visited Casterville Gardens: as neither had I until I entered
them to do stretcher-drill, tend moaning men, and carry bloody
slops in the overgrown alleys that wound among its tawdry,
abandoned glories. It had a half-rotted pier of its own, upon
which, in Victorian days, the penny steam-boats had discharged
many thousands of crowds of pleasure-seekers. The gardens
occupied the semicircle of an old quarry, on which the
decorative landscape gardener had fallen to work with gusto,
planting it with conifers and stucco statues in winding walks
that landed you straight from the sightless wisdom of Socrates
and Milton, or the equally sightless allurement of Venus,
shielding her breasts, upon a skittle-alley, a bandstand, a
dancing-saloon, or a bar at which stood, for contrast, another
Venus, not eyeless, dispensing beer. The conifers, flourishing
there, have grown to magnificent height. The effect of rain
upon the statues has not been so happy, and I have set my pail
down to pick a snail off the saddle-nose of Socrates and
meditate and wonder what he would have thought of it all.

"The dancing-saloon--still advertising itself as 'Baronial
Hall'--had been converted into a main ward, holding forty beds.
It was there that Farrell found me at work, that night. He had
interviewed the Adjutant--as we called the harassed secretary
who, brayed daily between the upper and nether millstones of
official instructions and 'voluntary effort,' never left his
desk nor dared to wander abroad for fresh air--the gardens
having been specially laid out to trick the absent-minded and
i