Bullets & Billets

<h2> CHAPTER XXXI </h2> <h3> SLOWLY RECOVERING&mdash;FIELD HOSPITAL&mdash;AMBULANCE<br/> TRAIN&mdash;BACK IN ENGLAND </h3> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>How I ever got back I don't know. I remember dragging myself into a cottage, in the garden of which lay a row of dead men. I remember some one giving me a glass of water there, and seeing a terribly mutilated body on the floor being attended to. And, finally, I remember being helped down the Wieltj road by a man into a field dressing station. Here I was labelled and sent immediately down to a hospital about four miles away. Arrived there, I lay out on a bench in a collapsed state, and I remember a cheery doctor injecting something into my wrist. I then lay on a stretcher awaiting further transportation. My good servant Smith somehow discovered my whereabouts, and turned up at this hospital. He sat beside me and gave me a writing-pad to scribble a note on. I scrawled a line to my mother to say I had been knocked out, but was perfectly all right. Smith went back to the battalion, and I lay on the stretcher, partially asleep. Night came on and I went off into a series of agonizing dreams. I awoke with a start. I was being lifted up from the floor on the stretcher. They carried me out. It was bright moonlight, and looking up I saw the moon, a dazzling white against the dark blue sky. The stretcher and I were pushed into an ambulance in which were three other cases beside myself. We were driven off to some station or other. I stared up at the canvas bottom of the stretcher above me, trying to realize it all. Presently we reached the train. Another glimpse of the moon, and I was slid into the ambulance car....</p> <p>In three days I was back in England at a London hospital&mdash;"A fragment from France."</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <SPAN name="image-24"><!-- Image 24 --></SPAN> <center> <ANTIMG src="illp262.png" width-obs="40%" alt="Finis"> </center> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />