I was no sooner in the hospital than I was to discover that the Canadians had sent ahead such glowing accounts of my exploit that in this hospital I found myself regarded as a hero and made much of, though you wouldn’t think a “hero” would create much of a sensation in this particular place whose every cot had again and again been occupied by heroes. One of the first at my bedside was the Rev. Michael Adler, chaplain of the Jews, and through his friendly offices I was enabled to send cards to my friends in England and Australia and other countries telling them I was dangerously wounded but most strongly hoped to pull through. Particular communications were sent to my old commander, Col. A. Gilbey and to Maj. Lionel de Rothschild at London. Again I passed into the hands of deft nurses. They removed my innumerable wrappings, cleansed me anew and--another transposition from hell to heaven--laid me in a spotless white linen-draped bed! I was weak as a wounded rabbit by this time perhaps, but nevertheless I was able to get a thrill out of this! A bed, all white, clean, sweet and neat! If only a wounded soldier out of the dirty trenches could turn poet! He could knock the spots off a lot of things other poets have written about love and Springtime and a’ that and a’ that! He could make the song of a thrush sound like a beaten tin pan by his ode to a little white cot and the angels that hover round it! Then three earnest, quick-eyed doctors looked at my smashed arm. Two of them were young men, the third middle-aged. It was he who finally left the group that stepped off from my bed-side for consultation and said: “My boy, I’m afraid it will have to come off--the hand, perhaps part of the arm.” I had expected the verdict, yet I would be dishonest not to admit that I was shocked and horrified just the same. My thumbless right hand had been laid bare of its bandages. I looked at it, maimed as it was, and shook my head. “I don’t want to lose my hand, doctor,” I said, “what is left of my hand. Certainly not my arm.” “Then,” he said, briefly enough, but with greatest kindness, “I cannot be sure that I can save your life.” So I told him that I had always been careful of my body, had lived cleanly against every temptation and asked him if that could not be considered to count for me. “Yes,” he said. “What you tell me certainly makes a difference. Yet I am hardly willing to advise you to take the chance.” A sudden confidence obsessed me. “I am willing to take the chance,” I told him. “I know I can fight it through.” He looked at me in a fatherly, studious fashion for several seconds. “Fallon,” he said, in a very ordinary tone of voice, “I think you will.”