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Sent five of the boys to Blighty, but that was all that happened
He’s too old to be puttering around dark tents full of dying boys.
 

      April 9. — I had a very peaceful night. Sent five of the boys to Blighty, but that was all that happened in my house.
      My orderly is a scream. He’s deaf, and consequently gets himself into all kinds of ridiculous scrapes. Last night he leaned up against the stovepipe to take a nap. Now that stovepipe is very ancient and when he leaned on it it cracked. Of course he did n’t hear it, and presently, just as he was dozing off, the pipe gave a fearful screech and fell on him. I laughed so hard I could n’t help him, and he finally crawled out by himself, a foot thick with soot and swearing frightfully. The poor old dear! He’s too old to be puttering around dark tents full of dying boys.
      April 10. — Everybody is going to be exhausted before this drive is over, it’s so long-drawn-out. But they are all so game. I did n’t know people could be like this.
      April 11. — Another peaceful night, the easiest yet.
      I got up early to-day, and after tea Ellen James and I went off for a walk. It was the first real spring day we’ve had for a long while, and it was good. We wandered down the beach road and turned off through the half-wild lane that loses itself among the pines on the lake shore. The air was warm, and heavy with the smell of burning brush, and the outlines of the hills and the sand dunes were hazy and unreal in the drifting smoke. Far up over our heads a solitary plane moved, a speck against the blue. We lingered for a while in the warm, lazy quietness, and then came out into the village. The contrast took my breath away.

ex Helen Dore Boylston, “Coming of Age,” inThe Atlantic Monthly 136:3 (September 1925) : 289-300 (297) : link
 

Helen Dore Boylston (1895-1984), nurse (with British Expeditionary Force in France, in First World War), anesthesiologist, writer (“Sue Barton” and other books for adolescent readers)
wikipedia : link

—

blighty : a wound suffered by a soldier in World War I that was sufficiently serious to merit being shipped home to Britain.

interesting etymology :
“first used by soldiers in the Indian army; Anglo-Indian alteration of Urdu bilāyatī, wilāyatī ‘foreign, European’, from Arabic wilāyat, wilāya ‘dominion, district’.”
wikipedia : link
from which —

...ultimately derives from the Persian word viletī...
meaning ‘foreign’,
which more specifically came to mean ‘European’, and ‘British; English’ during the time of the British Raj.
The Bengali word is a loan of Indian Persian vilāyatī (ولایاتی),
from vilāyat (ولایت)
meaning ‘Iran’ and later ‘Europe’ or ‘Britain’,
ultimately from Arabic wilāyah ولاية‎
meaning ‘state, province’.
The term subsequently gained an ironic connotation in its closeness to the English word blight,
which means “epidemic.”
 

3 September 2025