The Big Fight (Gallipoli to the Somme)Fallon, David
History
The Big Fight (Gallipoli to the Somme)
Fallon, David
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, British
And quite as remarkable was the repair of my broken jaw, the
extraordinary skill of dentistry by which the broken teeth were
re-made, the jaw itself braced and placed firm by golden bands. When
the work was completed I was overjoyed to find that I could articulate
without the slightest impediment and masticate as thoroughly and
easily as ever I could. For a long time, however, I was restricted to
mere liquid food, feeding out of a tube as if David Fallon were thirty
weeks instead of thirty years old.
From the hospital where the operation on my arm had been performed I
was taken in company with scores of other injured in a battalion of
motor cars to a train at Albert whence we traveled to Rouen, where
I remained for several weeks at No. 8 General Hospital and where my
attending physician was Capt. Page, and my nurse, Miss Templey, a
cousin of Maj. Templey, all of whom I had known in India.
I was quickly recovering my strength and was finally sent aboard the
_Caledonia_ for the trip to Southampton. They had spotless, clean bunks
for us and scores of charming young women--young college women, who had
left their studies to serve in the Volunteer Aid Detachment. Imagine
the peace and pleasure for men who were just returning from hell to
have such companionship, to listen to songs beautiful and soft, where
they had been listening to the scream of shells, to hear voices sweet
and gentle where they had been for months hearing only the sharp moans
of the wounded or the raucous voices of authority raised in deadly
emergencies! Talk of Nirvana at its best! This was something better!
Arrangements for our reception at Southampton were as smoothly
efficient and kindly as had been our transportation and treatment in
France. Individually, good fortune was attending every little distance
in my journey. Taken to London I found myself billeted in the home
of Lady Carnarvon in Bryanston Square. She had turned her beautiful
residence into a hospital and there I was quartered in a spacious
apartment with Lieutenant McDonald of a Lancashire regiment who had a
smashed leg and Capt. Fred Monk, M. C., who had also a smashed leg and
lost an arm.
But he was very cheerful regarding the situation and so was McDonald.
On the train for the wounded and also aboard the _Caledonia_ you
hardly heard any talk of war. Everybody was sick of it. They wanted to
talk about anything but war. But here at Lady Carnarvon’s in the days
that followed, naturally our memories came crowding back. And we went
over our hardships, the thrills we had experienced and then inevitably
the panorama would sweep our vision of the sections of No Man’s Land
we had seen with its piled and distorted dead and one of us without
feeling the necessity of telling the others of what he was thinking
would as inevitably say:
“Well, we are very lucky beggars after all.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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