nearly always happens, even wounds lost their power to pain in the
sleep of bottomless exhaustion. Those who could not sleep were drugged
with morphine. The moaning never stopped, but rose and fell and rose
again. It shook my heart. We turned from the ashen faces and went out
into the grey morning light. Everything seemed very grey. A mist was
drawing up slowly from the sluggish Lys, and we wondered as we went
shivering through it across the soaked grass what was happening beyond
it over there at Loos.

Next afternoon at tea we were all cheered by the news that a man who had
had his leg taken off three hours before was asking for a penny whistle.
At last it was discovered that one of the cooks had one. (Cooks in the
army are a race apart, possessors of all kinds of strange
accomplishments.) It was willingly handed over, and soon the strains of
'Annie Laurie' were rising softly from a cot in Ward VIII.

A month later the Principal Chaplain asked me to go to a battalion.
Chaplains who had been through the previous winter with battalions were
not anxious for another winter of it, if fresh men could be found. I was
thankful to go, in spite of all the kindness there had been on every
hand and the friendships made. The devilish ingenuity of wounds was
getting the better of me.

My charge was a brigade, containing a battalion of the Gordon
Highlanders, with which I was directed to mess. But the day I joined,
this battalion was taken out of the brigade, and as soon as the
rearrangement was completed I was transferred to one of the battalions
of The Royal Scots. While I was with this unit both its commanding
officer and its adjutant were changed. In both cases the cause was the
promotion of the officer in question.