e boy flung himself out of the
door. I caught him as he fell and he died in my arms. He had
diphtheria, as well as being wounded.

"The station was frightfully cold, and the men had to be laid on the
stone floors with just room for moving about between them. There was
no heat of any sort. The dead were laid in rows, one on top of
another, on cattle trucks. As fast as a man died they took his body
away and brought in another wounded man.

"Every now and then the electric lights would go out and leave us
there in black darkness. Finally we got candles and lamps for
emergencies.

"We had no surgical dressings, but we had some iodine. The odours were
fearful. Some of the men had not had their clothes off for five weeks.
Their garments were like boards. It was almost impossible to cut
through them. And underneath they were coated with vermin. Their
bodies were black with them frequently.

"In many cases the wounds were green through lack of attention. One
man, I remember, had fifteen. The first two nights I was there we had
no water, which made it terrible. There was a pump outside, but the
water was bad. At last we had a little stove set up, and I got some
kettles and jugs and boiled the water.

"We were obliged to throw the bandages in a heap on the floor, and
night after night we walked about in blood. My clothing and stockings
were stained with blood to my knees.

"After the first five nights I kept no record of the number of
wounded; but the first night we had eleven hundred; the second night,
nine hundred; the third night, seven hundred and fifty; the fourth
night, two thousand; the fifth night, fifteen hundred.

"The men who were working at the station were English Quakers. They
were splendid men. I have never known more heroic work than they did,
and the cure was a splendid fellow. There was nothing too menial for
him to do. He was everywhere."

* * * * *

This is the story she told me that night, in her own words. I have not
revised it. Better than anything I know it tells of conditions as they
actually existed during the hard fighting of the first autumn of the
war, and as in the very nature of things they must exist again
whenever either side undertakes an offensive.

It becomes a little wearying, sometimes, this constant cry of horrors,
the ever-recurring demands on America's pocketbook for supplies, for
dressings, for money to buy the thousands of things that are neede