fatigue
that verged on stupefaction; but the perpetual clatter of sabots and
shoes in the passage kept the mind alert and the eyes open. The chorus
of the wounded rose in gusts; there were always in the adjoining wards
some dozen men wounded in the head, and suffering from meningitis, which
provoked a kind of monotonous howling; there were men wounded in the
abdomen, and crying out for the drink that was denied them; there were
the men wounded in the chest, and racked by a low cough choked with
blood... and all the rest who lay moaning, hoping for an impossible
repose....

Then I would get up and go back to work, haunted by the terrible fear
that excess of fatigue might have made my eye less keen, my hand less
steady than imperious duty required.

At night more especially, the bombardment was renewed, in hurricane
gusts.

The air, rent by projectiles, mewed like a furious cat; the detonations
came closer, then retired methodically, like the footsteps of a giant on
guard around us, above us, upon us.

Every morning the orderlies took advantage of a moment of respite to
run and inspect the new craters, and unearth the fuses of shells.... I
thought of the delightful phrase of assistant-surgeon M----whom we had
attended for a wound on the head, and who said to me as I was taking him
back to bed, and we heard the explosions close by:

"Oh, the marmites (big shells) always fall short of one."

But to a great many of the wounded, the perpetual uproar was
intolerable. They implored us with tears to send them somewhere else;
those we kept were, as a fact, unable to bear removal; we had to soothe
them and keep them, in spite of everything. Some, overcome by fatigue,
slept all day; others showed extraordinary indifference, perhaps due to
a touch of delirium, like the man with a wound in the abdomen which I
was dressing one morning, and who when he saw me turn my head at the
sound of an explosion which ploughed up a neighbouring field, assured me
quietly that "those things weren't dangerous."

One night a policeman ran in with his face covered with blood.

He was waving a lantern which he used to regulate the wheeled traffic,
and he maintained that the enemy had spotted his lamp and had peppered
him with bullets. As a fact, he had only some slight scratches. He went
off, washed and bandaged, but only to come back to us the next day dead.
A large fragment of iron had penetrated his eye.

There was an entrance ward, where