IT WAS MY turn to be nursed, and I remember very little about it. Feverish and choking on the fluids that threatened to overwhelm my struggling lungs, I was ill for days, slipping in and out of consciousness.

Once it seemed I heard Matron saying, “She’s strong, I thought she’d be all right.”

I tried to rouse myself to tell her about Private Wilson and the body in the shed, but I couldn’t put the words together and must have made no sense.

Another time I heard Dr. Wright speaking. I opened my eyes and saw his thin, haggard face as he bent over me to listen to my lungs. “Her father is Colonel Richard Crawford. He’ll want to know.”

Know what? That I was dying? But I couldn’t let them down by dying! I couldn’t imagine my mother’s face when word came. A telegram? A letter? I couldn’t hold the thought long enough to decide.

Later still, it was Simon Brandon’s voice that reached me in the dim recesses of illness and pain, urging me to drink a little broth to keep my strength up. But Simon was in England, and I was in France. Confused, I let myself drift once more, wanting to cry with the agony in my chest that was threatening to kill me.

He was there again, bathing my face and hands as the fever peaked, and finally as I lay so weak that opening my eyes seemed to be too great an effort even to contemplate, his voice said bracingly, “It was a close-run thing, Bess, but you’re going to live. I’m taking you to England tomorrow. Hang on a little longer, and you’ll be home.”