Impressions of a War Correspondent | Page 7

mind on quiet scenes with the
sound of falling water, or the sound of falling breakers fringing the
rocks of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn! But sleep would not come;
the panorama of the world spun from scene to scene all the faster as he
tossed limply and wearily. Custos, quid de nocte? How slowly passes
the night, and night sleepless merges into sleepless day, and for a week
the struggle hangs on the winning line of Disease. Each time the
thermometer is drawn from his mouth an ever new-born hope which
has risen dies with the whispered score, but still the heart pumps
strenuously, telling of life and hope the while. On the morning of the
sixth day the score is down a degree. Too good to believe in until
confirmed by the midday record, and then very, very slowly, by
fractions of degrees, it shows less than the record of the previous days.
In the cool quietude of some Continental sculpture gallery--he cannot
tell where--he has seen a statue of Icarus--Icarus just feeling the
earth-spurning power of his new-given wings; Icarus on tip-toe, with
head up and godly-moulded chest and dilated nostrils, drinking in the
clear air, and extended arms towards his new possession of the clouds.
The glorious embodiment of god-like life, earth-spurning,
heavens-enjoying--and as such he feels--he forgets that his frame is a
skin-covered skeleton, that his legs would not bear him upright. He
knows only that the spirit of life has been breathed into him again, and
that it is very good to be alive. The feeling of being "half in love with
easeful death" has passed. The orchestra of life will play for him 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

chronic disease; but there is a worse than any of these disasters to the
victim. The man without a leg can get along with a crutch. We know
one who lost both legs in Egypt who goes about on a little
four-wheeled wooden cart, propelling himself with his hands, and
haunts the precincts of a certain club, where the members, seeing the
badge which