I said, ‘No.’
After an interval of staring at me, she went over to a cabinet to collect a card, and having looked at it, or pretended to, for a while, she said, ‘The bones in his leg are meshing satisfactorily,’ just as though she’d been looking at those bones there and then – and that was the end of the interview. I must believe her, I suppose. At any rate I must until I can speak to the surgeon, Hawks, who comes here from the Ilkley hospital, usually arriving alone in an ambulance carriage, in which he leaves accompanied by those men he proposes operating upon. Not only is Hawks a surgeon and a colonel, but also a professor into the bargain. As a result, he is incredibly pompous, generally speaking through third parties, and always calling Jim’s leg his ‘lower extremity’. He is expected later this afternoon, and I mean to wait for him.
I am certain that Jim is far too morose and silent for a man ‘on the mend’, and he is fearfully distracted. Oh, I know not to ask him questions about the precise goings on, so yesterday I started in on a general discussion of the war, and I asked him when he thought it might end.
‘Never!’
… And he turned away towards the window.
Something happened there to account for his silence. I mean one death that was worse than the others in some way – a matter of treachery among Jim’s own unit of men, the particular gang put to working the trains. The little trains, that is, the ones running at night on tracks laid down in an instant.
Those silly little trains. I have seen photographs of them, and these, together with Jim’s own vague accounts of working on the trains, caused the nightmare that I mentioned to you. The driver can hardly fit into the cab. His head pokes out of it, and I cannot help but picture them as pleasure railways, running at night – because they only ever