would spend the first year of life when war was ended. One man had a
baby whom he'd never seen; another a girl whom he was anxious to
marry. My dream was more prosaic, but no less ecstatic--it began and
ended with a large white bed and a large white bath. For the first
three hundred and sixty-five mornings after peace had been declared I
was to be wakened by the sound of my bath being filled; water was to
be so plentiful that I could tumble off to sleep again without even
troubling to turn off the tap. In France one has to go dirty so often
that the dream of being always clean seems as unrealisable as
romance. Our drinking-water is frequently brought up to us at the risk
of men's lives, carried through the mud in petrol-cans strapped on to
packhorses. To use it carelessly would be like washing in men's
blood----

And here, most marvellously, with my dream come true, I lie in the
whitest of white beds. The sunlight filters through trees outside the
window and weaves patterns on the floor. Most wonderful of all is the
sound of the water so luxuriously running. Some one hops out of bed
and re-starts the gramophone. The music of the bath-room tap is lost.

Up and down the ward, with swift precision, nurses move softly. They
have the unanxious eyes of those whose days are mapped out with
duties. They rarely notice us as individuals. They ask no questions,
show no curiosity. Their deeds of persistent kindness are all
performed impersonally. It's the same with the doctors. This is a
military hospital where discipline is firmly enforced; any natural
recognition of common fineness is discouraged. These women who have
pledged themselves to live among suffering, never allow themselves for
a moment to guess what the sight of them means to us chaps in the
cots. Perhaps that also is a part of their sacrifice. But we follow