He was a country lad, and had been struck in the spinal cord by a piece of shell. A kind of meningitis ensued, and, at once, he lost his reason. The pupils of his eyes swung to and fro with sickening rapidity; he never ceased moving his jaw, apparently chewing like a ruminant. One day I found him devouring a string of beads which had been hung round his neck by a chaplain. An orderly kept his mouth open while we removed several pieces of wood and steel. The poor wretch laughed softly, repeating: “It’s a bit hard. It’s a bit hard to chew”; and the lines of his face twitched with innumerable spasms of pain. Delirium upsets and wounds the spirit. For it constitutes the uttermost disorder--that of the mind. But it perhaps betrays benevolence on the part of Nature when it deprives man of the consciousness of his misery. Life and death have it in their power to confer these mournful blessings. Once I saw a soldier struck in so many places that the doctors decided he was beyond the resources of their skill. Among other wounds there was a long splinter of steel driven like a dagger through his right wrist. The sight was so cruel and revolting that an attempt was made to remove the steel. A doctor gripped it firmly and tried to loosen it with sharp, short pulls. “Is it giving you pain?” he said from time to time. And the patient replied: “No; but I’m thirsty!” “How is it,” I asked the doctor, “that he can’t feel the pain you are giving him?” “It’s because he is in a state of shock,” replied the surgeon. And I understood how the very extremity of pain sometimes obtains for its victims a truce which is, in a way, a foretaste of the sweets of death--the prelude to extinction. At each end of the large marquees one of those small bell tents had been erected to which the soldiers had given the name of “mosques.” They served as death chambers. There were placed the men who were lost to human succour, in a loneliness that presaged the tomb. And some of them were aware of this. There was a soldier with a riddled abdomen who asked, on entering the tent, to be dressed in clean linen. “Don’t let me die,” he pleaded, “in an unclean shirt. Give me something white. If you are too busy, I’ll put it on myself.”