Nothing made by man can kill me. No, not until she comes.
Then, after that--eight days, she'll be here soon, any moment? What?
You think so, too? Don't you? Surely, yes, any moment. Yes, I'll go to
sleep now, and when you see her rowing out from shore you wake me.
You'll know her; you can't make a mistake. She is like--no, there is
no one like her--but you can't make a mistake."
That day strange figures began to mount the sides of the ship, and to
occupy its every turn and angle of space. Some of them fell on their
knees and slapped the bare decks with their hands, and laughed and
cried out, "Thank God, I'll see God's country again!" Some of them
were regulars, bound in bandages; some were volunteers, dirty and
hollow-eyed, with long beards on boy's faces. Some came on crutches;
others with their arms around the shoulders of their comrades, staring
ahead of them with a fixed smile, their lips drawn back and their
teeth protruding. At every second step they stumbled, and the face of
each was swept by swift ripples of pain.
They lay on cots so close together that the nurses could not walk
between them. They lay on the wet decks, in the scuppers, and along
the transoms and hatches. They were like shipwrecked mariners clinging
to a raft, and they asked nothing more than that the ship's bow be
turned toward home. Once satisfied as to that, they relaxed into a
state of self-pity and miserable oblivion to their environment, from
which hunger nor nausea nor aching bones could shake them.
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