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theatre in the morning. He’ll have to be X-rayed first …” He consulted a list. “Major Moon’s doing a duodenal ulcer at half-past nine; could you have him ready after that?”
    â€œYes, sir, of course; it’ll just give the X-ray people nice time.”
    â€œWell, that’s what we’ll do then. Leave the leg as it is, nurse; clean him up a bit, but don’t worry him; and then you can give him a shot of morphia and I’ll see him again in the morning.”
    â€œPut a couple of screens round him, nurse,” said Sister, “so that the light doesn’t disturb him; I’ll leave out the morphia for you. Oh, and Major Eden, will you let me have something for the appendix Major Moon did to-day, and those two hernias? And the man in seven, Captain Newsome’s cartilage, you know, he’s developed a very troublesome asthma …” She drifted away with him, towards the bunk.
    2
    Frederica returned, still swallowing the last crumbs of her meal. “It’s too heavenly of you to have stayed on like this, darling. Have you coped all right?”
    â€œYes, nothing’s happened except a visit from Gervase.” She repeated the gist of his instructions. “I’ll stay and finish this fractured femur for you. You carry on; I’m perfectly all right.”
    Frederica whisked off up the ward. The lights flickered with the thudding of the guns. A bomb fell somewhere close. The old man stirred and groaned, “Bombs! Bombs! The bombs!”
    â€œNo bombs,” said Esther reassuringly. “Only guns; not bombs.”
    He lost even his feeble interest in the bombs. “The pain! ”
    â€œJust bear it for a little bit longer,” she said, her hand on his wrist. “Just while I get your clothes off and clean you up a little bit; and then you shall go off to sleep and forget all about it.” Standing with the basin balanced on her hip, towels over her arm, she looked down at him pityingly. Poor old boy; poor, frightened, broken, pitiful little old man.… She wrung out a piece of gauze in the hot water, and began gently to wash his face.
    3
    Night Sister had left out four quarter-grain tablets of morphia on a tray in the little bunk. Frederica looked up the prescriptions book. “Three ‘stat’ and one ‘s o s’. Will you give them, Esther? One to your man, and one each to the hernias; the appendix seems to be dozing off, so we’ll leave his s o s till he seems to want it. I’ll deal with this asthma question. Yes, all right, Wilson, I’m coming!”
    Esther lighted the tiny spirit lamp, dropped one of the tablets into a teaspoon, added sterile water and re-sterilised the whole over the flame, mixing in the dissolving tablet with the needle of the hypodermic syringe; sucked up the solution into the syringe and carried it over, with a piece of iodined gauze, to one of the hernia patients. “There you are,” she said, smiling at him, dabbing at the tiny puncture with the gauze. “That’ll set you up till the morning!”
    He smiled back at her hazily. “Thank you, nurse.”
    She gave the second injection to the other hernia, and a third to the fractured femur. He was becoming increasingly conscious, muttering wildly to himself: “Bombs! The bombs! All gone … all of us gone this time!”
    â€œThis will ease the pain now, and make you go to sleep.”
    â€œAll of us gone; all my mates gone.… All sitting there and the whole place came down on top of us.” He struggled up from his pillow, muttering wildly: “It’s going to hit us! It’s going to hit us …” and after a pause began to mumble softly to himself: “The effete and spineless remnants of Churchill’s once-great England … cowering in their rabbit holes from the might of the German air force.…”
    Frederica came and joined her at the foot of the bed.