again into the warm sunlight. Outside an orderly
relieved me of my steel and gas helmets, in much the same way as the
collector takes your ticket when you pass through the gates of a
London terminus in a taxi. Once more the stretcher was slid into an
ambulance, and I found myself in company with a young subaltern of the
K----'s. He was very cheery, and continued to assert that we should
all be in "Blighty" in a day or two's time. When the A.S.C. driver
appeared at the entrance of the car and confirmed our friend's
opinion, I began to entertain the most glorious visions of the
morrow--visions which I need hardly say did not come true.

"How were you hit?" I asked the officer of the K----'s.

"I got a machine-gun bullet in the pit of the stomach while digging
that communication trench into No Man's Land. It's been pretty bad,
but the pain's going now, and I think I shall be all right."

Then he recognised the man on the stretcher above me.

"Hullo, laddie," he said. "What have they done to you?"

"I've been hit in the left wrist and the leg, sir. I hope you aren't
very bad."

The engine started, and we set off on our journey to the Casualty
Clearing Station. For the last time we passed the villages, which we
had come to know so intimately in the past two months during rest from
the trenches. There was Souastre, where one had spent pleasant
evenings at the Divisional Theatre; St. Amand with its open square in
front of the church, the meeting-place of the villagers, now deserted
save for two or three soldiers; Gaudiempre, the headquarters of an
Army Service Corps park, with its lines of roughly made stables. At
one part of the journey a 15-inch gun let fly just over the road. We
had endured quite enough noise for that day, and I was glad that it
did not occur again. From a rather tortuous course through bye-lanes
we turned into the main Arras to Doullens road--that long, straight,
typical French highway with its avenue of poplars. Shortly afterwards
the ambulance drew up outside the Casualty Clearing Station.

The Casualty Clearing Station was situated in the grounds of a
chateau. I believe that the chateau itself was used as a hospital for
those cases which were too bad to be moved farther. We were taken into
a long cement-floored building, and laid down in a line of stretchers
which ran almost from the doorway up to a screen at the end of the
room, behind which dressings and operations were taking place. On my
rig