German sister represented no small part of two big German shipping
companies that could once have provided her with free passes over any
railway in the world. I had under me, too, a couple of Canadian drivers
whose lorry in crossing one of the ramshackle bridges over a river, hit
the railing on the side and plunged to the rocky depths below. A loose
tree-trunk that formed the roadbed of the bridge had jerked the steering
wheel from the driver's hands. Over went the lorry on top of them, and
the mercy of Providence only interposed a big rock that left room below
for the two drivers to escape the crushing that would have killed them.
Badly bruised only, they left me later to recover of their contusion in
the hospital at Dar-es-Salaam.




THE SURGERY OF THIS WAR


"Please give us a drop of Johnnie Walker before you do my dressing,"
said my Irish sergeant, who had lost his leg in the fight at Kangata.
Lest you might think that by "Johnnie Walker" he asked for his favourite
brand of whiskey, I may tell you that we had no stimulant of that kind
with us. It was chloroform he wanted to dull the pain that dressing his
severed nerves entailed. Always full of cheer and blarney, he kept our
ward alive, only when the time for daily dressing came round did his
countenance fall. Then anxious eyes begged for ease from pain. But this
once over, he laid his tired dirty face upon the embroidered pillow and
jested of all the things the careful German housewife would say could
she but see her embroidered sheets and the blue silk cushion from her
drawing-room that kept his amputated leg from jars. We had no water to