the glasses!" We had got terribly cold in the trenches. After taking
leave of our kind hosts we set off for the Hospital.

It was now about 1.30 a.m., and we were stopped no less than seventeen
times on our way back. As it was my job to lean out and whisper into the
sentry's "pearly," I got rather exasperated. By the time I'd passed the
seventeenth "Gustave," I felt I'd risk even a bayonet to be allowed to
snooze without interruption. The _blessés_ were deposited in Hospital
and the car, once rid of its wounded load, sped through the night back
to Lamarck, and I wondered sleepily if my first visit to the trenches
was a reality or only a dream.




CHAPTER VI

THE TYPHOID WARDS


When I first came to Hospital I had been put as V.A.D. in Ward I, on the
surgical side, and at ten o'clock had heard "shop" (which by the way was
strictly debarred, but nevertheless formed the one and only topic of
conversation), from nurses and sisters in the Typhoid Wards, but had
never actually been there myself. As previously explained the three
Typhoid Wards--rooms leading one out of the other on the ground
floor--were in a separate building joined only by some outhouses to the
main portion, thus forming three sides of the paved yard.

The east end of the Cathedral with its beautiful windows completed the