They talked of an operation. Nothing would have induced me to let them operate in that country where the least scratch turned septic. After several weeks I was sent to Malta, where I was treated for twenty-one days. At the end of that time the specialist asked me if my career would be interfered with if he sent me home for consultation as to an operation. One reason he could not do it was that it was a long business, six weeks in bed, at least, and they were already overfull. The prison door was about to open! I assured him that on the contrary my career would benefit largely by a sight of home, and to my eternal joy he then and there, in rubber gloves, wrote a recommendation to send me to England. His name stands out in my memory in golden letters.
The fact that all my kit was still with the battery was a matter of complete indifference. I would have left a thousand kits. At home all the leaves were turning, blue smoke was filtering out of red chimneys against the copper background of the beech woods--and they would be waiting for me in the drive.
England had changed in the eighteen months since we put out so joyously from Avonmouth. Munition factories were in full blast, food restrictions in force, women in all kinds of uniforms, London in utter darkness at night, the country dotted with hutted training camps. Everything was quiet. We had taken a nasty knock or two and washed some of our dirty linen in public, not too clean at that. My own lucky star was in the ascendant. The voyage completely cured me, and within a week I was given a month’s sick leave by the Medical Board,--a month of heaven more nearly describes it, for I passed my days in a state of bliss which nothing could mar, except perhaps the realisation, towards the end, of the fact that I had to go back and settle into the collar again.
My mental attitude towards the war had changed. Whatever romance and glamour there may have been had worn off. It was just one long bitter waste of time,--our youth killed like flies by “dug-outs,” at the front, so that old men and sick might carry on the race, while profiteers drew bloated profits and politicians exuded noxious gas in the House. Not a comforting point of view to take back into harness. I was told on good authority that to go out to France in a field battery was a certain way of finding death. They were being flung away in the open to take another thousand yards of trench, so as to make a headline in the daily papers which would stir the drooping spirits of the old, the sick, and the profiteer over their breakfast egg. The _embusqué_ was enjoying those headlines too. The combing-out process had not yet begun. The young men who had never been out of England were Majors and Colonels in training camps. It was the officers who returned to duty from hospital, more or less cured of wounds or sickness, who were the first to be sent out again. The others knew a thing or two.