Читать книгу A Town Like Alice онлайн

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As I took the certificate I asked curiously, "Did you get any of those things yourself?"

He laughed. "I was one of the lucky ones. All I got was the usual dysentery and malaria, the ordinary type malaria, not cerebral. Overwork was my trouble, but other people had that, too. We were in such a jam, for so long. We had hundreds of cases just lying on the floor or bamboo charpoys in palm huts--it was raining almost all the time. No beds, no linen, no equipment, and precious few drugs. You just couldn't rest. You worked till you dropped asleep, and then you got up and went on working. You never came to an end. There was never half an hour when you could slack off and sit and have a smoke, or go for a walk, except by neglecting some poor sod who needed you very badly."

He paused. I sat silent, thinking how easy by comparison my own war had been. "It went on like that for nearly two years," he said. "You got a bit depressed at times, because you couldn't even take time off to go and hear a lecture."