Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon

Staring at my face in a mirror two months after the accident, I compared my pallid appearance with the picture of health I used to see in a small scrap of glass when I was shaving with cold water in the Army. All my sunburnt health and hardihood had vanished with my old pair of breeches (which the nurse who looked after me had thrown away, saying that they made the room smell like a stable), but I had still got my skimpy tunic to remind me that I had signed away my freedom. Outside the doctor's house where I was lodged, another stormy December afternoon was closing in with torrents of rain. Would it ever stop raining, I wondered. And would my right arm ever be rid of this infernal splint? Anyhow, my December face matched the weather in exactly the same way as it had done in August and September.

The Yeomanry were now in a camp of huts close to the town. Every Saturday Bob Jenner or one of the others came to see me; while they were with me my ardour revived, but when I was alone again I found it more and more difficult to imagine myself sharing the discomforts which they described so lightheartedly. But I had only exchanged one prison for another, and after reading about the War in the newspapers for nine weeks, the "faith and fire" within me seemed almost extinguished. My arm had refused to join up, and I had spent more than an hour under an anaesthetic while the doctor screwed a silver plate on to the bone. The fracture wobbled every time I took a deep breath, and my arm was very much inflamed. When I was out for a walk with my arm in a sling I felt a fraud, because the people I passed naturally assumed that I had been to the Front. When my squadron commander came to see me I couldn't help feeling that he suspected me of not getting well on purpose. I still found it impossible to imagine myself as an officer. It was only half an hour's walk to the Yeomanry camp, but I could never get myself to go up there.