ve written of what they have
seen: the great hotels that are now English hospitals; the crowding of
transport wagons; the French signs, which now have English signs added
to them; the mixture of uniforms--English khaki and French blue; the
white steamer waiting at the quay, with great Red Crosses on her snowy
funnels. Over everything, that first winter of the war, hung the damp
chill of the Continental winter, that chill that sinks in and never
leaves, that penetrates fur and wool and eats into the spirit like an
acid.

I got through the customs without much difficulty. I had a large
package of cigarettes for the soldiers, for given his choice, food or
a smoke, the soldier will choose the latter. At last after much talk I
got them in free of duty. And then I was footfree.

Here again I realise that I should have encountered great
difficulties. I should at least have had to walk to Calais, or to have
slept, as did one titled Englishwoman I know, in a bathtub. I did
neither. I took a first-class ticket to Calais, and waited round the
station until a train should go.

And then I happened on one of the pictures that will stand out always
in my mind. Perhaps it was because I was not yet inured to suffering;
certainly I was to see many similar scenes, much more of the flotsam
and jetsam of the human tide that was sweeping back and forward over
the flat fields of France and Flanders.

A hospital train had come in, a British train. The twilight had
deepened into night. Under the flickering arc lamps, in that cold and
dismal place, the train came to a quiet stop. Almost immediately it
began to unload. A door opened and a British nurse alighted. Then
slowly and painfully a man in a sitting position slid forward, pushing
himself with his hands, his two bandaged feet held in the air. He sat
at the edge of the doorway and lowered his feet carefully until they
hung free.

"Frozen feet from the trenches," said a man standing beside me.

The first man was lifted down and placed on a truck, and his place was
filled immediately by another. As fast as one man was taken another
came. The line seemed endless. One and all, their faces expressed keen
apprehension, lest some chance awkwardness should touch or jar the
tortured feet. Ten at a time they were wheeled away. And still they
came and came, until perhaps two hundred had been taken off. But now
something else was happening. Another car of badly wounded was being
unloaded. Throug