its face covered, slowly extended one huge arm, the index finger pointing. There was a vast sigh of “Ah!” from the crowd and Strange knew that he had lost. Whatever it was. Whatever it was that was at stake. Then he realized that someone, the anesthetist, was talking, shouting at him, in capital letters.
“THERE WE GO, THERE WE GO, HE’S ALL RIGHT. SURE. HE’S ALL RIGHT. YOU’RE ALL RIGHT. THERE, NOW.” The anesthetist was smiling at him.
Strange managed to wink at him but the white figure still filled his mind, more real than any of the reality around him and it stayed with him all the groggy way back to the ward rolling along the corridors on the meat wagon and it stayed with him the next two days that they kept him partially doped up. It stayed sharply between his eyeballs and everything he looked at.
Curran was not one to be stingy with dope and painkillers when somebody was in pain. When he stopped by that first afternoon to see him, he said he did not believe with Maj Hogan and Col Baker that standing pain was the essence of a man. Strange only nodded and looked at him and smiled, seeing in front of him that great white figure and pointing arm. Curran still seemed less real.
It had had a profound effect on him, the dream. Or vision. Or whatever it was. It seemed so real it took on the quality of a revelation almost. But what was it supposed to mean? All Strange knew was that, somewhere, he had been tried and found wanting. But he did not even know what the trial was for. He had the feeling that in the vision he had not been told, either. He had simply been judged. No defense. It did not matter. The judgment was fair. In the dream he had felt a great sense of guilt, and then relief. An enormous sorrow, and relief. Relief that at last somebody knew.
Vaguely now, but sharply in the vision, he had the feeling he was being sent back somewhere he had hoped to be allowed to leave. That was what the silent finger seemed to indicate: you are sent back, and must stay. But Strange did not know sent back to where.
Even when he was back on his feet and the painkillers withdrawn, the powerful image of the white figure and pointing arm would not leave him and he could not get away from the feeling that he was being told something.
In the fact of it and because the painkillers they gave him weren’t all that strong, he was not off his feet all that long. On Curran’s orders, the ward attendants had him up and out of bed and moving around the ward before the afternoon of the first day was over.
Curran did not like to use plaster casts, and had had a molded plaster plate made and bandaged underneath the hand so that only the knuckle joints themselves were held immobile. Curran maintained that casts had caused more cripples than the wounds that had required their use.
“We’re such a long, long way from what we could do in surgery and orthopedics,” he said with his mild smile. “God only knows how long it’s going to take. And only God knows what lovely advances will come out of this beautiful war.” Curran’s eyebrows hooked upward over his pale eyes.
Then, sitting on the bed edge, he turned and with a sharp twinkling grin asked Strange to come out with him sometime and have a few drinks, and to bring his buddies. Strange said that he would.
Strange did not know what had caused him to take such an interest in the four of them. Probably it was the saving of Prell’s legs. “That first sergeant of yours, Winch, must be quite a guy,” Curran said. “What he did for Prell and the way he arranged that medal for him are really something. I’d like to meet him.” Strange said he would try to arrange it. He did not know what Curran meant by the way Winch “arranged that medal.”
But he didn’t really care. He already knew pretty much what Winch would say. Which was a flat No. He and Winch saw pretty much eye to eye about officers. Officers were of a different caste, and ought to stay there. But of course he and Winch were old Regulars. And this was the wartime Army. Full of civilians. Strange made up his mind