The following day he had an extension put on the injured leg. If you can imagine what it is to have a terribly injured knee, then to have it cut about, and finally to have it held up for half an hour or more while the extension is put on, you have just a faint idea what Jock suffered in grim silence. He was in the torture chamber but he never winced—only the youth went out of his face and a sort of grey old age seemed to come upon him. I said to him later: ‘You’ve had an awful time of it to-day, Jock.’ He was still faint with pain, but he murmured: ‘No so bad. Oh! it was no so bad at all, Nurse.’ To these bad times belonged his polite requests, ‘Will you pull my leg a wee?’ and ‘Will you sort my leg?’—a phrase which always delighted me; but, as a Scottish captain asked seriously when I had quoted this latter request, ‘What else _could_ he have said?’ Often in those bad winter days when Jock’s temperature rose with such alarming bounds, I used to wonder if he would ever see Scotland again. There was the dreadful bugbear septicæmia, and there was always the likelihood that he would have to lose his leg. But he had a good angel in Sister B. No one could ‘sort his leg’ as she could, no one could hurt him so little or so quickly as she, and no one could put in what he called ‘they tubes’ as she could—those deadly tubes that seemed to go by winding alleys and narrow desperate ways under his patella and right through the back of his knee. I think she staked her soul (and no one gave more life and soul to her patients than she did) that Jock should keep his leg. She was the first who dared to get him into a wheel chair; she taught him to walk again; she comforted him and helped him to face the long months, for even Jock had his dark days—more of them than he let us know. He used at these times to read Burns with devotion, and he told me that ‘Desolation’ and ‘Man is made to Mourn’ were his favourite poems, and exactly expressive of his feelings. ‘One gets a wee bit fed up at times,’ he confessed, ‘thinking one’ll never play football again.’ Football had been his joy, and somehow I think he went out to the war as to football on a larger scale. Quite casually he described the Highlanders’ charge at Loos. He was out of it very soon himself, but even at that moment his thoughts had all been outside himself. ‘I prayed then as I never prayed before,’ he remarked. ‘For the stretcher-bearers to come to you,’ suggested a listener. ‘No, of course not’—this with surprise—‘I prayed for the boys. Man! it was grand to see the kilts go by.’ Casually he told of his effort to save one of his officers who was severely wounded. But both of them were unable to move and they lay on the field for twenty-four hours. Patrick MacGill in his terrible description of Loos tells how the Jocks were scattered, dead and wounded, on the battlefield, their bare knees gleaming in the pale morning light. But for many there was no return.