The Soul of the Soldier: Sketches from the Western Battle-FrontTiplady, Thomas
History
The Soul of the Soldier: Sketches from the Western Battle-Front
Tiplady, Thomas
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, English
In addition to Canadians, South Africans, Australians, and New
Zealanders, who have come by the hundred thousand at the call of the
Motherland, there are hundreds of thousands who have come singly, or in
small parties, from remote corners of the earth. For five weeks I was a
patient in a Canadian hospital in France. The entire staff was
Canadian. Some were Canadian born; others had gone out to that country
years ago. All were of British blood. The colonel was a magnificent
specimen of manhood from London, Ontario, in which city he had been
born. He would sit on the bed and tell us tales of the great snow-land.
Sometimes he would scold us for being so blind to the greatness of the
Empire and tell us what Canada thought of the Motherland. One of the
night orderlies would, on occasion, recite to us some poem such as "Jim
Bludso," before the lights went out. Then he would come to my locker
and take "Palgrave’s Treasury of Songs and Lyrics" with which to regale
his soul during the long watches of the night. He was of the full
stature of men and straight as a pine. He had gone out from Ireland as
a boy, and settled on a cattle ranch in the United States. One day
there was trouble and one of the other cowboys sent a bullet clean
through his chest. The moment war was declared he left his roving herds
of cattle, crossed the frontier into Canada and traveled hundreds of
miles to Winnipeg to enlist. The doctor looked at him. "What is this
scar on your chest?" he asked. "Oh," replied the cowboy, "I fell off a
wagon and knocked the skin off." The doctor turned him round and put
his finger in the scar on his back where the bullet had passed out.
"And what is this scar at the back? Did you fall off another wagon?"
And the two men understood one another and laughed. The doctor could
not find it in his heart to send the cowboy back to his ranch, so he was
passed into the Canadian contingent.
One of the nurses we called "the Little Mother." She had gone to Canada
five years before, but the war had brought her back, and well was it for
us that it had. Among the patients was a doctor in the American A.M.C.
His ancestors had left England generations ago and settled in New
England, but he had come back at the call of war--a grandson of the
Motherland. Then there was a lieutenant of British stock who had been
born and brought up at Antwerp, but as the German guns were destroying
his native city he took ship to enlist in the British army. "Anzac"
was, as his nickname denotes, an Australian. He was in the Flying
Corps. He had heard the call at school and had come "home" to the land
of his fathers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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