My body was battered, half-frozen, gone altogether helpless, but I am grateful that my mind remained faithful to its task. In fact, it seemed to scorn the state of my body and was extraordinarily clear and acute. Every fact, impression, knowledge of any sort that I had obtained on my venture into the German position arrayed itself neatly and precisely in my thoughts. The Canadians wanted to rush me off immediately on a stretcher, but after the refreshment of a drink of water, I felt quite able to complete my work by reporting to the proper officers the information I had gained. Two were soon at my side, racing through a communicating trench from their dug-out.

I indicated to them an inside pocket of my tunic where were the maps I had made roughly in the darkness, but which I knew would be significant to them. My broken and shattered jaw made talking something of an agony, but I was able to bear it and mumble what additional knowledge I had to yield.

These fellow officers were extravagant in praise of my adventure and almost embarrassed me by their solicitude, insisting on lifting me with their own hands into the stretcher that had been brought and on walking beside it to the entrance of the hospital which was on the third trench line. It was no easy task for the stretcher bearers. To reach this hospital they had to descend long, rude, tortuous stairways. The hospital room was one hundred feet underground. Its only illumination was by candlelight and you got the impression of mystery and tragedy. In the dim glow the white-robed doctors and gray-robed nurses moved noiselessly on a tanbark-covered floor. Their noiselessness made all the more distinct sharp moans from my fellow wounded. There were not cots enough for all. Some had been laid on pallets of straw.

Three men were terribly wounded. One had both legs off. The chest and shoulders of another had been torn raw and half his chin smashed away. My restless eyes saw the face of another the orderlies were just bandaging. His eyes had been ripped out.

Some months before I had heard an anecdote of a poilu who had lost both hands. And when a sympathetic French woman would have commiserated him for this dire misfortune, he unconsciously by old habit and therefore none the less pitifully raised the stumps to make a true Gallic gesture with hands that were not there, and he said to her:

“Madam, it is right that you should pity me. My friend, Anatole, gave his life. I was but privileged to give my hands for France.”

I’m Irish and I’m emotional and that splendid reply stuck hard and fast in my admiration. It is but natural that a man should feel certain moments of keen bitterness when he realizes he has been crippled for life. But if I had the slightest impulse to self pity, which I had not, the reply of that poilu would have shamed it out of me. And if not that, there was the sight of the three men in this dim, subterranean hospital so much more terribly wounded than I. I could only think of myself as having been fortunate. A doctor had looked at my wounded arm, murmured something to the orderly, shaken his head discouragingly. But I remembered that I had not only escaped thus far with my life but had the further good fortune of having a clean, healthy body to fight for me—for my life and possibly—I didn’t go farther than to think it out that way—possibly I might not have to lose my arm.

To add to my optimism I soon began to know the first experiences of a transposition from hell to heaven. From the hell of the dirt and grime, disease, vermin and death of the trenches to the heaven of the sweet peace and tenderness that sick men feel under the gentle ministrations of noble women.

They were wonderfully expert in cutting away and stripping my mud-soaked and rotted uniform and other clothing from my body. I hardly felt a pang when they lifted and snipped away the cloth from the sleeve of my burned left arm and cleansed the wound of my long-tortured and smashed right hand and forearm. I could almost smile when, having washed my torn mouth, they further cleansed it with antiseptics that stung cruelly. With these same rapid, clever hands they rubbed my body from head to feet with anti-frost grease and I grinned as after that they rolled me up in cotton wool, just as if I were some big, foolish sort of a doll to be boxed and sold at Christmas. I continued to grin, for after that they made a Teddy Bear of me, pulling over the cotton-wool thick, full length woolen tights and a big, stuffy woolen Jersey.

One of the nurses was a young woman with blue eyes—just the sort of blue eyes I had thought of when I was lying in fever out in the mud-hole; the other a middle-aged woman of serene deportment. The young nurse, catching me grinning, smiled back at me, but the older nurse looked puzzled.

“What in the world,” she said in her cool, even voice, “can that young rascal find to laugh at in such a time as this?” “Isn’t it splendid,” said the young nurse, “that he can laugh?” And she nodded toward me with a knowing smile and—bless my soul! what, crazy irresponsibilities our emotions are! I suddenly found my eyes filled with tears.

She came back to me a few seconds later with a glass of hot milk which I had perforce to drink through a tube and, thank the Lord, she made no notice of my wet eyes.

I had been two hours in the underground, cave-hospital when I was transferred to a stretcher and sent off, borne by four giant Scots with two other Scots accompanying to act as reliefs in the task of carrying me half a mile or more to another station. They could not have been more kindly and attentive to gentleness in carrying me had they been the bearers of a princeling. It was rough walking, most of it more than ankle deep in mud, and when one of the bearers stumbled, went to his knees and nearly shot me off the stretcher, one of the relief men strode forward in great anger:

“Make way oot o’ that, Jock,” he commanded, “and gie me the handle. D’ye no think the puir officer already hurt enough?” I would say for him after he took hold that never once did he stumble.

They finally landed me safely, and with fewer jars and jolts than were to have been expected, at a small station where I became a passenger on a curious ambulance. It was made of a stretcher swung between two enormous wheels that one sees on rustic carts. An old fat horse drew this ambulance. The stretcher swung gently between the wheels as he stolidly plodded over rough ground, sometimes muddy, sometimes rocky. It was slow moving, for night had come and all along our course shell-craters, which would capsize the ambulance did it slump into them, had to be guarded against.

My wounds sometimes set viciously to work to give me pain, but again would show mercy. I found a certain soothing effect in the swing of the hammock. And I stared up at the stars that were brilliant and thought how wonderful it was that I was alive at all and reflected whether if I were to be able to fight no more, my country might not make use of me in drilling her other young sons to “carry” on in her tremendous and noble cause. The good, old fat horse bore me two miles on my way and brought me to a motor ambulance. It had three bunks in it and two were already occupied. When I was placed in this ambulance I began to think that perhaps I had been premature in believing my life saved. For I knew enough of ambulances to know that the bottom bunk is reserved for the carrying of the most dangerously wounded and it was into the bottom bunk they slid me.

I am perfectly willing that Henry Ford should have such advertising as may be from me, for it was an ambulance of his make I rode in, and the fact that it could proceed at all over the roads we had to travel and often enough no roads whatsoever—in and out of gulleys, shell-holes, over sunken fields up pathless hills and finally land me at No. 9 Clearing Station of the Red Cross, certainly earns it honest commendation.

The ambulance drivers told me that the foul-fighting Huns had attacked this big frame hospital only a few days before, and although their shells had not struck, the shocks from the explosions had snapped the slender threads by which three dangerously wounded men were clinging to life.

I was no sooner in the hospital than I was to discover that the Canadians had sent ahead such glowing accounts of my exploit that in this hospital I found myself regarded as a hero and made much of, though you wouldn’t think a “hero” would create much of a sensation in this particular place whose every cot had again and again been occupied by heroes.

One of the first at my bedside was the Rev. Michael Adler, chaplain of the Jews, and through his friendly offices I was enabled to send cards to my friends in England and Australia and other countries telling them I was dangerously wounded but most strongly hoped to pull through. Particular communications were sent to my old commander, Col. A. Gilbey and to Maj. Lionel de Rothschild at London.

Again I passed into the hands of deft nurses. They removed my innumerable wrappings, cleansed me anew and—another transposition from hell to heaven—laid me in a spotless white linen-draped bed! I was weak as a wounded rabbit by this time perhaps, but nevertheless I was able to get a thrill out of this! A bed, all white, clean, sweet and neat!

If only a wounded soldier out of the dirty trenches could turn poet! He could knock the spots off a lot of things other poets have written about love and Springtime and a’ that and a’ that! He could make the song of a thrush sound like a beaten tin pan by his ode to a little white cot and the angels that hover round it!

Then three earnest, quick-eyed doctors looked at my smashed arm. Two of them were young men, the third middle-aged. It was he who finally left the group that stepped off from my bed-side for consultation and said:

“My boy, I’m afraid it will have to come off—the hand, perhaps part of the arm.”

I had expected the verdict, yet I would be dishonest not to admit that I was shocked and horrified just the same.

My thumbless right hand had been laid bare of its bandages. I looked at it, maimed as it was, and shook my head.

“I don’t want to lose my hand, doctor,” I said, “what is left of my hand. Certainly not my arm.” “Then,” he said, briefly enough, but with greatest kindness, “I cannot be sure that I can save your life.”

So I told him that I had always been careful of my body, had lived cleanly against every temptation and asked him if that could not be considered to count for me.

“Yes,” he said. “What you tell me certainly makes a difference. Yet I am hardly willing to advise you to take the chance.”

A sudden confidence obsessed me.

“I am willing to take the chance,” I told him. “I know I can fight it through.”

He looked at me in a fatherly, studious fashion for several seconds.

“Fallon,” he said, in a very ordinary tone of voice, “I think you will.”

It wasn’t more than an hour after that when I was on the operating table for the infected fragments of my thumb had to be cut away and if the arm was to be saved at all other surgical work was necessary. As to the success of these operations it is only necessary to say that I still have my arm and my hand, though it is thumbless. For a long time this right arm of mine was a useless appendage dangling from my shoulder. But week by week it became more like a living member of my body.

When I was given an anÆsthetic for the major operation, I suddenly got the absurd notion of counting—counting from one to nineteen. Well, it was “20” before I woke up.

When I did so it was to find myself squeezing for dear life the hand of the nurse beside me. As I batted my eyes she said:

“You bad boy, you’re hurting me.”

“I thought I was in heaven holding the hand of an angel!” I gasped at her, not making much of a success, however, of this attempt to be gay.

But she chuckled—the nicest softest chuckle you ever heard.

“That,” she told me, “will be sufficient of your blarney.”

Then I had a long sleep. And when I awakened I was weak as an infant and for days fed like one—hot milk out of a bottle from a baby’s tube affixed.

They told me afterward the fight for my life was a hard one—on one or two occasions desperate. I know myself there were times when I thought the fight was going to finish against me.

But something happened that would brace any man. The nurse with the lovely chuckle brought a paper to me and read it, pausing to make every word clear, distinct, impressive. I could feel new blood racing into my veins at every word.

For she read to me the order of recommendation for the decoration of Lieut. David Fallon with the Military Cross as sent out from my Battalion Headquarters, forwarded to Field Marshal Haig at Grand Headquarters, approved by the great British leader, and thence forwarded for posting in all British commands.

And it read:

“Lieut. David Fallon, Oxfordshire and Buckshire Light Infantry. Though dangerously wounded he carried out a most daring reconnaisance and gained much valuable information. He set a splendid example throughout.”

I don’t think science would have failed me. But if it were going to, here was the magic cure.