He had no sooner settled down than a voice was heard calling for "Second-Lieutenant Hackett." "Here," replied the Guardee, without any enthusiasm. A dapper Staff Officer, so tall that he had to stoop to enter the compartment, drew a paper from his pocket. "You?" he asked. "Well, Hackett, this is a great evening in your life, and I congratulate you." He shook the Guardee's left hand. "You have been given the D.S.O.," he added hurriedly, for the train had already begun to move. With that he disappeared. It was not until the following morning that the Sister came in to dress his wound. "What strong teeth you've got, boy!" she said. Nobody knew better than he did that his teeth were large and tended to protrude, but it is always annoying to have one's defects admired. The Orderly was, in his way, an artist. He was light-handed, quick, deferential, and soothing--a prince among Orderlies. He produced wonderful tit-bits--amongst other things tinned chicken, sardines, chocolate, and, for the Guardee, stout! Three minutes after the Sister had strictly forbidden him to read, the Orderly smuggled into his hand the Paris _Daily Mail_ of the day before. Von Moltke had been dismissed. "The first of the great failures," he said to himself. But the Sister was right; it was too painful to read. "What are we stopping here for?" the Guardee asked once. "To unload the dead, sir," replied the Orderly, with serious suavity. The journey took over two days. They touched at Versailles and Le Mans, the Advanced Base, swept slowly down the broad valley of the Loire, past the busy town of Nantes, followed by the side of the estuary, oddly mixed up with the shipping, and eventually came to rest in the town of St. Nazaire, at that time the Base of the British Army. CHAPTER XXXIII ST. NAZAIRE His next home was a comfortable little bed in a white-painted cubicle of a boys' school that had been turned into a Base Hospital. When at length he found himself at rest in his new bed, he sighed with contentment. Everything was so quiet, and clean, and orderly. After the dirty estaminet, and the feverish hurry of the Clearing Hospital, this was indeed Peace. They gave him real broth to drink and real chicken to eat. And that night, as he sank almost for the first time into real sleep, he felt that heaven had been achieved. Life began to creep slowly into his paralysed limbs. With infinite labour he could force his first finger and thumb to meet and separate again. His toes wagged freely. The only fly in the ointment was that the "stuff they did their dressings with" was of a fiercer nature and hurt more than the previous ones. Also, the dressings became more frequent.