I made friends with them
on the other side of cases too heavy for one man to handle--with a
golden-haired, blue-eyed boy from Bart's (I think), who made the
most preposterous jokes in the darkness, so that I laughed and
nearly dropped my end of the box (I saw him in the days to come
doing heroic and untiring work in the operating theatre), and with
another young surgeon whose keen, grave face lighted up
marvellously when an ironical smile caught fire in his brooding eyes,
and with other men in this hospital and ambulance column who will be
remembered in Belgium as fine and fearless men. With the
superintendent of the commissariat department--an Italian lady with a
pretty sense of humour and a devil-may-care courage which she
inherited from Stuart ancestors--I went on a shopping expedition into
the black gulfs of Fumes, stumbling into holes and jerking up against
invisible gun-wagons, but bringing back triumphantly some fat bacon
and, more precious still, some boxes of tallow candles, of great worth
in a town which had lost its gas.
I lighted dozens of these candles, like an acolyte in a Catholic church,
setting them in their own grease on window-sills and ledges of the
long corridors, so that the work of moving might go on more steadily.
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