Francis Gordon was not killed at the disaster of Loos. A stretcher-bearer wheeled him, unconscious of whistling shrapnel, to the casualty-clearing station at Vermelles; and thence, still unconscious, he came by Ford ambulance and Red Cross train and yet another ambulance to a great bare hospital at Rouen.

For three days he knew nothing. Life ebbed and flowed back again in waves as of morphia: pain throbbed and receded through the torn body it could not awaken. On the fourth day, very dimly, he grew conscious of his suffering self. It seemed to him that he lay in a four-poster bed, round which figures moved vaguely. He heard one of the figures speaking: “It’s time for his injection”; felt something prick his fore-arm; drowsed off again into unconsciousness.

Next morning he awoke to pain. Some one was questioning him. The some one had a board in her hand; wanted to know who he was. (For secret service men wear no “identity discs”; and Nurse Prothero had been ordered to find out the name of the patient). He told her: “Gordon, Francis, Captain, Intelligence Corps.” “Religion?” she asked. “Church of England, sister.”

The nurse, a comely middle-aged creature, smiled down at him; and he slept. But gradually, the morphia ebbed away from him. Pain called to consciousness....

It took his drugged mind three whole days to grasp its new realities. He had been wounded, badly wounded. (How, he could not yet remember.) His left thigh-bone was shattered; his right foot badly smashed. The thing above him—which made the bed seem like a four-poster—was a “super-structure”: a frame-work with a pulley arrangement whereby his left leg, a mass of bandages, could be hauled up and down for dressing. Both left leg and right foot were “septic”: in the wounds, had been inserted indiarubber-tubing—Carrel-Dakin tubes—to drain them. The changing of these tubes caused him constant pain.

The screens round his bed prevented him from seeing the other patients in the ward. But he knew them to be many; and, lying awake at night, he could hear the orderlies shuffling round in their list slippers: their “Are you awake, sir?” sounded an unceasing chorus to his dreams.

For the alert clean-shaven doctor had only reduced, not stopped, the morphia: and Francis had many dreams. They came as the morphia-wave surged over him in comfortable pain-killing warmth; receded as the wave ebbed, leaving him prey to suffering. And always, in his dreams, he saw Beatrice, a gracious figure vignetted in silver radiance against the background of his thought. It seemed as though her spirit watched over him, tender, infinitely solicitous....

He had been in hospital eight days before it was borne in on his dazed intellect that he must write to her. They fought him, sisters and doctor, for three weary hours. “He was too ill to write letters,” said the doctor. “Let me write for you,” begged Sister Prothero. But Francis insisted. They could neither persuade nor coerce him. He would write a letter; write it with his own hand. Lying there, feverish, broken, not even certain of the exact words his lips uttered, he forced them to his will. At last, they yielded—for they knew his chance of life still hung by a hair: and an orderly brought him paper, an envelope, an indelible pencil.

The sister propped him with pillows. As she lifted him, he felt his head turning, spinning.... Yet he wrote, tracing each word with pain. A letter of lies, of glorious lies. He was in hospital, wounded—only slightly wounded, she must understand—in a few days, he would be about again—would write her a long letter—meanwhile, he sent his “very kind regards.” He folded the sheet himself; put it in the envelope; wrote the address; signed in the left-hand bottom corner. ... Then he fainted; and, for a week, doctor and sisters blamed themselves for their yielding, fearful lest the man should die.

As a “case,” he puzzled them. The wounds were healing, slowly, very slowly. Thinking to cheer him, they told him of his progress. It appeared to have no interest for him. He was content to drowze away the hours: watching his leg move up and down for its dressing; listening to the murmur of the ward. For he had lived in a year, this broken man who lay there so quietly, a thousand aeons of terror. He had walked, unarmed and alone, through countless caverns of fear. Now, fear had departed; and the mind took its revenge for long coercion, refused to function. The mind knew that its body would not die; and with that knowledge, was content....

They pronounced him “out of danger.” Nurse Prothero brought him many letters. He read them languidly. It appeared that Peter had been moving heaven and earth to find out if he lived: Patricia wrote asking him if he wanted books, cigarettes: Prout wrote and sent on a package of press-cuttings: his name had been in the “Roll of Honour”: the literary press of England noticed him, praised him, printed his photograph in their columns. But Francis Gordon cared for none of these old things. He wanted Beatrice!

He used to lie there, hour after hour, screened from the world, thinking of her. His mind went back to days before the War, and he saw himself as he had been: the tango-dancing champagne-bibbing egotist, very proud of his little literary achievements, neither good nor bad, merely a drifter. He saw himself, ruined financially, miserable. And he met her again, in his dreams; sailed with her, once again, the tropic seas of their delight.

Beatrice, the Woman Denied! Surely that God who had once denied her to him, calling him unworthy, would not refuse her to him now. Surely, now, he might say to himself, in clean pride: “I have done my Work; paid full price for any happiness this world can offer me?” ...

And then, five weeks after he had written, came her cable: “Am anxious,” she wired, “have you told me the truth about your wounds.” He spread the cablegram on his bed; read it again and again. Intuition, sounder than judgment, told him the truth. To this girl, five thousand miles removed from the cataclysm of Europe, he stood for “heroism”—a vague figure dowered with all the virtues of war. It needed only a word, a weak word, to make her love him.

The mere thought was a flaring temptation. Why not? If ever man had earned woman....

When the doctor made his midday visit, Francis—looking down at his swathed legs—asked one straight question.

“You mean,” said the doctor, “is there any reason, any physical reason, why you should not marry?”

“Exactly, doctor.”

“None whatever.”

“But I shall always be more or less a cripple?”

“You will walk with a limp—a slight limp. That isn’t being a cripple.”

Alone, he fought the problem out again: and decision came to him, clear-cut, obvious. She was twenty, rich, beautiful: he, a cripple—and a pauper cripple into the bargain. Leaving God out of the question, to take her in marriage would not be the act of a gentleman.... Chivalrous, stubborn, a fool if you will but no weakling, he traced the answer to her cablegram: “Much better thanks writing.”

In the middle of December, 1915, they shipped him—still a “stretcher-case”—to England.