Impressions of a War Correspondent | Page 6

the point at
which, as a rule, disease wins the game.
Take the case of a fellow the author knows intimately. He had held out
too long without going to hospital, putting down his weakness,
lassitude, and general feeling of extreme cheapness to the climate
instead of the real cause, with the result that he started on the real
struggle with a temperature of 104.8. At the very start Disease had
pulled him over nastily close to his line, and was still pulling him over,
as his temperature was rising point by point. There are various methods
of treatment--with him they fought it with a drug called phenacetin, and
to the lay mind a wonderful drug it appears. It is not effective with
every one. A man in the next bed to him might have been taking
breadcrumbs for all effect it produced. With him, however, it worked
like clockwork. No sooner was a five-grain dose swallowed than the
temperature stopped in its upward course. Then, gradually, like in a
good Turkish bath, the pores of his skin opened, and a most complete
and profuse perspiration ensued, which was allowed to go on for a

couple of hours. Then, with bed and bedclothes drenched, he lay weak,
limp, and feeling like a squeezed sponge, but with a temperature that
shows three degrees marked down towards his own line. Should there
be a nurse available the patient is washed down and put into fresh
clothes and pyjamas; if not, as was most usually the case, he lies in his
sweat, his skin chilling in patches for a while, and feeling sticky and
uncomfortable all over, but too limp to move. The drug has a strange
and wonderfully clearing effect on the brain. He feels as if all his
previous life had been passed in some land of twilight. Now he lives in
a land of glorious light--light that pervades everything. His eyelids are
closed to shut in the glorious light. He seems to have been sitting in
some dark theatre when the lights have been turned on on a glorious
transformation scene. He has circled the world and seen its loveliest
places, but only now sees how beautiful they were. In Samoa, and the
Pali at Honolulu, he sees the individual leaves shimmering in the clear
air, and then on his quickened consciousness falls a great sense of the
beauty of the world. Separate from the beauty of the world seems the
life on it, and now for the first time his lips are pressed to her bluest
veins. "I want to take your temperature, please," as he feels the little
glass tube at the dry skin of his lips. "105.2," he hears whispered when
it is withdrawn. They think he cannot hear as he lies motionless with
eyes closed. All the three degrees have been lost, and more--it is a score
for Disease. Another dose of phenacetin--surely all that glorious,
untravelled, half-tasted world is too beautiful and rich with promise to
leave, too full of music he has not heard, too full of pictures he has not
seen, too full of unplucked laurels, of lips unkissed, of sunsets which
have not yet painted the clouds in their setting--above all, along the
passed path of his life are neglected flowers of love lying which he has
walked on with scarce a smile of thanks for the throwers, whose hands,
perchance now withering, he longs to kiss.
Temporarily the thermometer score is favourable to him again, but all
he can do is to lie very still, knowing that every feather-pressure of
strength will be wanted. Lying sideways, as he has been shifted round
by his nurse on the pillow, he hears the pump, pump of his heart. He
never noted that pumping before as he does now--quick and strenuous
it is, but still strong, without the spur of stimulants. Pump on, old heart,

he thought-speaks, and on it pumps through the long hours of watching
and waiting; and he watches as a captain might watch the pumping of
his water-logged ship. He is lucky to have a heart that works like that.
The man beside him was being given brandy every three hours to help
the action of his heart. Another thing he was lucky in was in being free
from headache. A sufferer farther down from time to time called aloud
in agony from the terrible splitting pains in his head, while his was
clear to a supersensitive degree--too clear and active to allow of
sleep--and soon came the time when he longed with a great yearning
for the sleep that would not come. It seemed cruel and unfair that any
beggar, any coolie in the fields, any convict could have this sleep that
was denied him. How he tried to fix his