BLIGHTY.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume XLV, Issue XLV, 3 August 1917, Page 1

BLIGHTY.

OK THE WAY HOME. ' [By a Correspondent in the London ' Timse.'] There was a noise like a train rushing over Holborn Viaduct, the night sky seemed to fill with spectroscopic Hashes, and the next thing I knew was that I was being jolted over a rough road in an ambulance. There was a smell of iodine and disinfectant that took me miles away to a shee.p-dippinjr race under some big bluegums. 1 saw the sheep being urged forward, the dogs running across their backs, the crutcher standing where he eould best catch the swimming sheep and douse them well under in the dip". Then the sheep seemed to go faster and faster through the race until I lost count and gave it up. There were no sheep when 1 came to again, but there was a neat nurse, who listened patiently to my sheep story and told me to go on counting them. Late that evening I realised that I was wounded, and the thought pleased me, for there was every chance of getting home, or at least across the Channel, the next best home to a man who comes from the other side of the world. Certain doctors came that evening and scribbled cryptic marks on. a label, which they huu<j on the top button of what had once been my tunic. I read it, but could make nothing of it. The nurse passing smiled. " Blighty," she said, and I blessed her. There came a long white train with beds down both sides, and into one of these I was hoisted. The motion of the train and the long hours of waking had made me very tired, and I fell asleep again, to dream of a- long dusty road and an old skew-bald horse that 1 knew quite well was miles away in X«w Zealand. It was all so real, and the hot sun beat down on me and ou the cattle 1 was driving. Away in the distance rose the snow-capped peak of Ngaurtihoe, with its banner of white steam blowing softly northward from the crater. The pumice dust lay thick on the road, and I could see the hoot" marks of the cattle. The dogs, wet-tongued and weary, loped alongside, keeping in the shadow of my horse. It was a grand dream, and I was sorry when it finished, as it did ~when the orderlies on the quay lifted me from the wharf and carried me up the gangway to the deck of the hospital ship. There was more iodine in the breeze, but there was also the smell of the salt air, clean and sweet. I was lifted, stretcher and all, into a cot, and someone worked a lever so thai, the whole affair, with me on it, disappeared into the innards of the ship, much as the pantomime devil bobs down again below the stage to that place in which we once fondly believed he really lived. ACROSS CHANNEL. Then someone removed my torn clotliing. and much soil of Flanders. And then —oh ! the luxury of it—l "was put between clean white sheets by a rosy Ted orderly who stuttered painfully. He was a good soul, and if he makes every man in his ward ou each trip as comfortable and as happy as he made me, then he must be laying up a store of blessings for himself above. When the ship started I lay so that I could see out of the port, and the air, sharp and salt, rushed over my face and cooled me. The waves sparkled in the early spring sunshine and lapped softly against the hull. Every now and again gnlls circled into the little space of the outside world that I could see, and I envied them for their quick means of transit. There is something soothing in lying in a bunk on a ship that sails a calm sea. There was the noise of heavy army boots on the deck ahove, the cheerful clatter "of dishes from somewhere down below, and the chaff and laughter of the men who were not too much hurt to talk. Hours I lay like this, and then there was a slackening of speed and • a cheer from the deck. We cheered down below, too, "for we were nearing the quay. It was Blighty, and at that moment we all of us knew what Blighty stood for. Through the porthole I saw a long wharf with red sheds and canvas-covered gangways on it. Orderlies waited with stretchers, and in a few minutes were aboard. The "walkers" went ashore, and we cot cases were taken in solemn procession into the lons shed where every face was English. Another train,- and then we steamed out into the open. First we sped through lanes of brick houses all turning their backs on us. •There were the dear dirty backyards of England, than which nothing is less artistic, but they looked grand, and on every second one was a "Welcome home" notice. One old man stood beside a huge calico sign that bore the legend: "Well done, lads, and *»ood luck to you." He got a cheer of thanks trom every carriage of the train. And then the rolling downs and the chesshoard fields, and the fat cattle that are not - all gone yet. Over the rising ground the spire of a distant church topped the trees that, laced the horizon, and as we stopped to let off some cot cases for a local hospital the sound of bells came softly over to us. Then I made a quiet vow that the first Sunday I could get out I would go to churcli and sit beside my mother in the high-backed I pew under the shelter of which my grandfather used to sleep. That was England. It came to me suddenly. Fresh from fields of mud and barbed wire, from duck-boards and dusouts, I realised how England could be symbolised. A country Sunday stand: for England.