There was a special ward known as the ‘Amputs’ Ward, which was full of men who had recovered from amputations of one or both legs due to jungle ulcers. They were marvellously cheerful people, and many of them were already getting about on bamboo crutches. The Vitamin Deficiency Wards were not different in any way from the normal Beri-Beri and Pellagra Wards, but there was still an awful lot of the most hideous dermatitis.

The Ulcer ward was terrible. When I saw it, it was already greatly improved, but it was still a fearsome sight, for the bad ulcer cases lay there who had not been considered strong enough to bear amputation, and who were now lingering grimly on, and hoping for help from a newly developed skin-grafting technique. There was one of my men there, a man so clean and smart formerly that he had become the pride of the Battalion Police in Singapore. I was warned to expect a great change in him, and because he is now fatter than ever, though of course a little lame, I feel justified in describing the condition he was in then. His head was shaven, his eyes sunken and wolfish, and his face fallen in; the skin of his body was rough and flaking off in great brown scales and his frame looked like a skeleton wrapped up in thin, dirty brown paper. His leg had an ulcer more than a foot long and, had they thought he could stand it, he’d have lost that leg long ago. At the same time that he had had the ulcer, he had fought his way through pneumonia, dysentery, jaundice, beri-beri and malaria. How in heaven’s name his constitution did it, God alone knows – the doctors didn’t; but he pulled through and is alive and walking today.