But the dearest of all our sad little family was certainly Alfred; Alfred Morgan of a Welsh regiment, never mind which. He was brought in from a military prison—sentenced for desertion, a case for a certain paper that champions the injured Tommy. Poor Alfred, with his wits all gone to pieces, his head and limbs shaking, his face working, seemed to us a living protest against any judgment but a doctor’s. I could hardly bear to see him, so hopelessly insane did he look. Death would have been far better than this doddering idiocy. The other men, sanest of the sane compared with him, tried to pet him and to coax answers out of him, but his mind, as Sister B. remarked, was a jig-saw puzzle gone to pieces. The pieces seemed to have no cohesion. He talked ramblingly of Bob his horse, of a dog, a canal, some medals, a picture, of Ada and the pigeons. He fancied the floor was the canal, and fished there with groping hands. Sometimes a word or a place-name would seem to rouse him, and he’d tell us the names of streets or of people: at other times he would shake his head and gaze vacantly round him, or look with that worried, bewildered look that made one’s heart ache. It was Sister B. who did the most to fit the puzzle together. Every night she would sit by his bed and question him, bringing him back to the point time after time. We were filling in more of the puzzle every night. Alfred had lived in Birmingham, had been on a canal barge, had taken coal to some place; he had won medals, had a mother, and there was a picture that he remembered. Policemen excited him to frenzy, and when he saw one of the Force he would fling apples or slippers, or any handy missile, through the window. He could play cards too. There was a gradual mental development—the most fascinating thing one can watch. But it was slow, and Alfred seemed like a rudderless boat at sea till he met Jock. Jock is a story all to himself. Suffice it to say of him that his vocation was to be a guardian angel. Every Scottish soldier is Jock in hospital, and perhaps other hospitals have found Jocks like ours—always unselfish, cheery, uncomplaining, infinitely pitiful to every trouble but their own; still I believe our Jock would outshine theirs. Sister B. decided to bring Alfred on a visit to Jock’s ward. I must say that the experiment was painful. A surgical ward is a very cheerful place, and poor Alfred, shaky, bewildered, pitiful, was a figure to darken the sun at that time. But Sister B. was a nurse of brave experiments. She dared and succeeded; she was resourceful and passionately interested in her patients. So she brought Alfred to this sane and happy ward, and sat him down by Jock’s bed. Jock had been wounded at Loos in September, 1915, and had remained in bed for eight months with the occasional variation of an operation and brief respites when he was up and in a wheeled chair.