During the afternoon of her death, a violent thunderstorm, with torrential rain, fell upon us--the worst of many storms we had experienced. The heavens seemed to corroborate our sense of tragedy. The whole sky became black like night, and over the eastern hills, messages were flashed in hieroglyphics of zig-zag lightning, up and down the blackness. In the west, blood-red clouds spread themselves crudely over a dark grey sky; and on the northern side, in curious opportuneness, a rainbow--in the mythology of our Scandinavian ancestors, the bridge which led heroes, fallen in battle, to their heavenly Valhalla--shone, as an inspiration of the Life beyond. I was glad of the fierceness of the storm, because it distracted the attention of the Unit; they were obliged to watch carefully their tautened tent ropes, if they did not want to see their tents whirled across the plain. Tent ropes are awkward customers when rain and wind are combined, for until you get used to such conundrums, it is difficult to see how you can simultaneously obey the rule--to loosen them during rain, and tighten them during wind. Nurse Ferriss had died in a large ward tent in which other nurses, her friends, were also lying ill. From them it was necessary to keep the news that she was dead. We told them that we had moved her to a quieter tent. Quite true. On the funeral day, at the time when most of the members of the Unit were collecting, to join the procession, a member of another unit, who chanced to be staying with us for a couple of nights, thoughtfully suggested that he should keep the ears and eyes of the patients occupied, by singing and playing to them on his banjo. For ten minutes before I started, as chief mourner, I sat on Nurse Ferriss's empty bed and listened, with outward ears, to nonsense about a cat that wouldn't come home at night, and a needle in a hay stack that wouldn't let itself be found. Then, when the time came for the procession to start, I said I was busy, and left the banjo party sitting up in their beds, shouting with laughter at the latest caprices of the cat. I then marched with our Unit, to the little chapel attached to Major Protitch's hospital, for here our dead was lying.