I watch
with faint interest and a feeling of vague recollection. She looks up
sideways and shades the sun off her eyes with her fingers. They keep it
up still then!
Some way off, among the Tommies' quarters, I can see groups of patients
in clean, dark-blue clothes walking about, or sitting on seats, taking
the air; some hobbling on crutches, some with arms in slings, heads
bandaged, or patched and mended in some way or other. You feel like some
damaged implement tossed aside a moment for repair. "Mend me this
lieutenant!" The doctors get to work, deft and quick; a little
strengthening, repairing, polishing, and out you are shot again.
It has been the only glimpse of absolute peace and rest I have had this
eleven months. Every one is kind and sympathetic; a cool breeze blows
through the looped-up tents; it is all very luxurious and pleasant for
wearied-out soldiers. I like to lie and watch the little pictures
through the tent openings of low blue veldt hills in the distance (which
somehow remind one of the background glimpses in old Italian pictures),
and dream over things one has seen and done, many of which seem already
such ages ago, and listen to the bugle calls that sound at intervals in
the camp. I have managed to buy some pyjamas. Probably you would see
something very ludicrous in the way in which, after an elaborate
hot-bath and hair-cutting, dressed out in one's clean pyjamas and lying
between clean sheets, one rolls one's eyes with unutterable complacency
on one's surroundings.
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