The Road To Blighty

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When the sister's back is turned, a one-legged officer nips out of bed and hops like a crow to the gramophone. The song that follows is a favourite. Curious that it should be, for it paints a dream which to many of these mutilated men--Canadians, Australians, South Africans, Imperials--will have to remain only a dream, so long as life lasts. Girls don't marry fellows without arms and legs--at least they didn't in peace days before the world became heroic. As the gramophone commences to sing, heads on pillows hum the air and fingers tap in time on the sheets. It's a peculiarly childish song for men who have seen what they have seen and done what they have done, to be so fond of. Here's the way it runs:--

"We'll have a little cottage in a little town
    And well have a little mistress in a dainty gown,
    A little doggie, a little cat,
    A little doorstep with WELCOME on the mat;
    And we'll have a little trouble and a little strife,
    But none of these things matter when you've got a little wife.
    We shall be as happy as the angels up above
    With a little patience and a lot of love."

A little patience and a lot of love! I suppose that's the line that's caught the chaps. Behind all their smiling and their boyish gaiety they know that they'll need both patience and love to meet the balance of existence with sweetness and soldierly courage. It won't be so easy to be soldiers when they get back into mufti and go out into the world cripples. Here in their pyjamas in the summer sun, they're making a first class effort. I take another look at them. No, there'll never be any whining from men such as these.

Some of us will soon be back in the fighting--and jolly glad of it. Others are doomed to remain in the trenches for the rest of their lives--not the trenches of the front-line where they've been strafed by the Hun, but the trenches of physical curtailment where self-pity will launch wave after wave of attack against them. It won't be easy not to get the "wind up." It'll be difficult to maintain normal cheerfulness. But they're not the men they were before they went to war--out there they've learnt something. They're game. They'll remain soldiers, whatever happens.