‘Well,’ he said philosophically, ‘this is a queer night we’re having. A man in the other ward tells me ’e’s been seein’ rabbits. It’s too much! I just says “This must stop. There’s too many seein’ rabbits to-night.” I knew a man what saw red, white, and blue rats—had ’em proper, ’e did.’ Morton sighed. He was a gentle soul, capable of infinite tenderness and patience, as many orderlies are. They are, one sometimes thinks, gentler than women, less conventional, and stereotyped in their kindness. ‘Poor man!’ Morton murmured. ‘A good old soul. It’s queer how little one thinks of it. When the young ones die it comes worse on one.’ A few minutes afterwards the sergeant was dead. Unused to death, I hardly realised it. At once preparations were made for his laying-out and subsequent removal. There is a routine about death as about birth. The immensity of the spiritual change is obscured by the methodical functions of material life. Yet death is the supreme adventure. It seemed sad for the old man to have met this great adventure among strangers, to go forth silently, without tears or prayers or love from us who watched. Yet I think this quiet, unemotional passing is dignified. Very soon afterwards the orderlies came with a stretcher and the Union Jack for pall, and so the old man left us. His body went to the mortuary, and his soul—surely, ‘his soul goes marching on.’ And all the time the other men slept like weary children. Only Harman sat up, still awake and watchful in his terrible nervous tension. Hospital is a world to itself, and those outside know little of it; so one often thought, when visitors expressed surprise that we all seemed cheerful. Of course we were not all cheerful or always cheerful. The cheerfulness of the Tommy is a composite thing. In part it is due to his youth and his character, and is in that sense natural; but it is in part his religion—in some cases his only real religion. To be cheerful is ‘to play the game’—that wonderful, indefinite, sacred ‘Game’ of the English, which demands the utmost of body and soul. Just sometimes a man who had become one’s friend would admit the bitterness of his heart, would say that he was ‘fed-up,’ only to laugh it off and ask the eternal riddle, ‘Where’s the good of grumbling?’ So we were really cheerful at most times, but I always thought the most cheerful time the hours between five o’clock and eight in the morning.