“When are you going to write me another sonnet?” asked the nurse. “The last one was much admired.” “The last one was rotten,” said the boy. “I have written a real corker this time. Read it to yourself, and don't drop its pearls before these swine.” “Well, you must be good, or I won't read it at all.” An officer of the British army, who was also a poet, hurled the bedclothes off and sat on the edge of his bed in his pajamas. “I'm fed up with everything! I hate war! I don't want to be a hero! I don't want to die! I want to be loved!... I'm a glutton for love!” In his pajamas the boy looked a child, no older than a schoolboy who was mine and who still liked to be tucked up in bed by his mother. With his tousled hair and his petulant grimace, this lieutenant might have been Peter Pan, from Kensington. The night nurse pretended to chide him. It was a very gentle chiding, but as abruptly as he had thrown off his clothes he snuggled under them again and said: “All right, I'll be good. Only I want a kiss before I go to sleep.” I became good friends with that boy, who was a promising young poet, and a joyous creature no more fit for war than a child of ten, hating the muck and horror of it, not ashamed to confess his fear, with a boyish wistfulness of hope that he might not be killed, because he loved life. But he was killed... I had a letter from his stricken mother months afterward. The child was “Missing” then, and her heart cried out for him. Opposite my bed was a middle-aged man from Lancashire--I suppose he had been in a cotton-mill or a factory--a hard-headed, simple-hearted fellow, as good as gold, and always speaking of “the wife.” But his nerves had gone to pieces and he was afraid to sleep because of the dreams that came to him. “Sister,” he said, “don't let me go to sleep. Wake me up if you see me dozing. I see terrible things in my dreams. Frightful things. I can't bear it.” “You will sleep better to-night,” she said. “I am putting something in your milk. Something to stop the dreaming.” But he dreamed. I lay awake, feverish and restless, and heard the man opposite muttering and moaning, in his sleep. Sometimes he would give a long, quivering sigh, and sometimes start violently, and then wake up in a dazed way, saying: “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” trembling with fear, so that the bed was shaken. The night nurse was always by his side in a moment when he called out, hushing him down, whispering to him. “I see pools of blood and bits of dead bodies in my sleep,” he told me. “It's what I saw up at Bazentin. There was a fellow with his face blown off, walking about. I see him every night. Queer, isn't it? Nerves, you know. I didn't think I had a nerve in my body before this war.” The little night nurse came to my bedside. “Can't you sleep?” “I'm afraid not. My heart is thumping in a queer way. May I smoke?” She put a cigarette between my lips and lighted a match. “Take a few whiffs and then try to sleep. You need lots of sleep.”