Amy felt, not envy exactly, but a longing to find things so easy – fall in love, get married, no problems. She felt different now; everything had changed. She had given herself to Johnny. At least, she had given her heart and her body, but what about her mind? She so wished that she could talk it over with someone, with Helen, perhaps, one day. The war seemed to escalate in horror; her own problems seemed puny and unimportant. The talk around the hospital was dire. One of the men, shot in both legs, told her that two battalions of soldiers had been buried alive in their trenches by German artillery. When they got to them all they could see were rows of bayonets sticking up out of the ground. All the men were dead, suffocated as they stood. The picture was horrifying. The wounded poured in. There were men with infections, not just surgical cases, men with typhoid, infective jaundice, pneumonia and dysentery. They had been put in the upstairs bedrooms to be nursed, isolated from the others.
