Mathematics in Literature

Can you identify the author of the following passage?

The patient, now that he was here, belonged as much to the French field hospital as to any other, and as the big English ambulance from Ypres had driven off again, there was not much use in protesting.  The French surgeon was annoyed and irritated.  It was a characteristic English trick, he thought, this getting other people to do their work.  Why could they have not taken the child to one of their own hospitals, since he had been wounded in their lines, or else have taken him to the hospital provided for Belgian civilians, where, full as it was, there was always room for people as small as this.  The surgeon worked himself up into quite a temper.... [His] thoughts travelled round and round in an irritated circle, and always came back to the fact that the English ambulance had gone, and here lay the patient, and something must be done.

Answer

This is from Nurses at the Front, edited by Margaret Higonnet.

---

For earlier challenges (and their answers), go to previous challenges.