Explore "The Soldier's Song" by Alan Monaghan on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
By the time Stephen got home he was sick of hospitals. The one at Lemnos had been welcome because it was the first. After the torrid heat of Turkey it was clean and cool and peaceful, but he didn't have long to enjoy it. Fever struck on his second night and for the next week he was racked by shivers and sweats and delirium, so the next thing he remembered was waking in Malta, in another hospital; another long room with distempered walls and a cool breeze whispering between the beds.
A week passed before he was fit to move again – a week of staring at the ceiling and wondering if this was real, or if he was just asleep in a roasting hole in Turkey and would shortly wake to the filth and flies. But reality slowly gained ground. On the voyage south he was able to taste the fresh scent of the sea, and when the hospital ship docked in Alexandria he could feel the pulsing chaos on the quays before he was plunged bodily into it on his stretcher, carried shoulder high through teeming hordes of urchins thrusting their wares at him, ‘Eggs a cook! Eggs a cook!'